When branches are processed by a pipeline simply, after each taken branch, at least one cycle remains unutilized. This is because of the assembly line-like apathy of pipelining. Instruction slots following branches are known as branch delay slots.Delay slots can also appear following load instructions; these are defined load delay ... Read More

Processors use a large variety of approaches and techniques for branch handling. Three methods give an increase to the basic methods of in-branch handling. These are as follows −whether branch delay slots are usedhow unresolved conditional branches are handledwhether the architecture provides represents to prevent conditional branches.The fundamental approaches to ... Read More

It can evaluate and compare different branch processing techniques, it can require a performance measure. Let us consider the execution of a branch instruction in a four-stage pipeline as shown in the figure. If the branch is processed straightforwardly, the branch target address (BTA) will be computed in cycle ti+3.Then ... Read More

Pipelining is a very effective method for speeding up instruction execution along a sequential path. But if a branch introduces the pipeline and disorganizes the sequential processing, the implementation of the pipeline will be seriously disrupted unless appropriate methods are used.It can indicate the problems that generate branches in pipelines. ... Read More

Conditional branch instructions are used mainly in two situations. Most frequently they are employed to check the result of instruction for a specified condition, such as whether the result equals 0, if it is negative, and so on.If the specified condition is met, control is transferred to a given location ... Read More

A branch in a computer program is an instruction that communicates a device to start implementing several instructions instead of simply performing the instructions in order. In high-level languages, these are defined as flow control phases and are established into the language. In assembly programming, branch instructions are established into ... Read More

The design space of instruction dispatch is complex. In some respects, it resembles that of instruction issue but it has two additional aspects, as shown in the figure.Dispatch Policy − The dispatch policy can be considered as a scheduling policy consisting of the components as −Selection Rule − The selection ... Read More

Shelving is an advanced issue mode, which is employed to eliminate issue blockages due to dependencies. Shelving makes use of dedicated instruction buffers, called shelving buffers, in front of each EU. The design space of shelving is shown in the figure. It consists of the following four main components such ... Read More

VLIW ArchitectureVLIW represents a Very long instruction word. It is an instruction set architecture constructed to take complete benefit of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) for upgraded performance.Central processing unit processors enable programs to designate instructions to execute in order only whereas a VLIW processor enables programs to explicitly determine instructions to ... Read More

The PentiumPro is the flagship of Intel’s x86 line of processors. The Pentium Pro processor performs a dynamic implementation microarchitecture such as a specific set of multiple branch prediction, data flow analysis, and speculative implementation. The Pentium Pro processor has a decoupled, 12- phases, super pipelined implementation, trading less work ... Read More