The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.

The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.

Date of Patent:
Apr. 12, 2016

Filed:

Jul. 31, 2013
Applicant:

Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA (US);

Inventors:

Shyam Sundar, Sunnyvale, CA (US);

Conrado Blasco-Allue, Sunnyvale, CA (US);

Assignee:

Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA (US);

Attorneys:
Primary Examiner:
Int. Cl.
CPC ...
G06F 9/06 (2006.01); G06F 9/30 (2006.01); G06F 9/38 (2006.01);
U.S. Cl.
CPC ...
G06F 9/30032 (2013.01); G06F 9/384 (2013.01); G06F 9/3838 (2013.01); G06F 9/3863 (2013.01);
Abstract

A system and method for efficiently performing microarchitectural checkpointing. A register rename unit within a processor determines whether a physical register number qualifies to have duplicate mappings. Information for maintenance of the duplicate mappings is stored in a register duplicate array (RDA). To reduce the penalty for misspeculation or exception recovery, control logic in the processor supports multiple checkpoints. The RDA is one of multiple data structures to have checkpoint copies of state. The RDA utilizes a content addressable memory (CAM) to store physical register numbers. The duplicate counts for both the current state and the checkpoint copies for a given physical register number are updated when instructions utilizing the given physical register number are retired. To reduce on-die real estate and power consumption, a single CAM entry is stores the physical register number and the other fields are stored in separate storage elements.


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