The present invention relates to a processor having a trace cache and a plurality of ALUs arranged in a matrix, comprising an analyser unit located between the trace cache and the ALUs, wherein the analyser unit analyses the code in the trace cache, detects loops, transforms the code, and issues to the ALUs sections of the code combined to blocks for joint execution for a plurality of clock cycles.

Methods, systems and apparatuses for processing a plurality of threads of a single-instruction multiple data (SIMD) group are disclosed. One method includes initializing a current instruction pointer of the SIMD group, initializing a thread instruction pointer for each of the plurality of threads of the SIMD group including setting a flag for each of the plurality of threads, determining whether a current instruction of the processing includes a conditional branch, resetting a flag of each thread of the plurality of threads that fails a condition of the conditional branch, and setting the thread instruction pointer for each of the plurality of threads that fails the condition of the conditional branch to a jump instruction pointer, and incrementing the current instruction pointer and each thread instruction pointer of the threads that do not fail, if at least one of the threads do not fail the condition.

Disclosed herein is a method for managing of NOP instructions in a microcontroller, the method comprising duplicating all jump instructions causing a NOP instruction to form a new instruction set; inserting an internal NOP instruction into each of the jump instructions; when a jump instruction is executed, executing a subsequent instruction of the new instruction set; and executing the internal NOP instruction when an execution of the subsequent instruction is skipped.

A system, mechanism, tool, programming product, processor, and/or method for generating a hazard in a processor includes: identifying one or more cache lines to invalidate in a second level memory of a processing core in the processor; invalidating, in response to identifying one or more cache lines to invalidate in the second level cache, the one or more identified cache lines in the second level memory; and invalidating, in response to invalidating the one or more identified cache lines in the second level memory, the corresponding one or more cache lines in a first level memory. In an aspect the hazard generating mechanism is triggered, preferably on demand, and includes in an approach searching for cache lines in the second level memory that are also in the first level memory.

The present invention relates to the implementation for implementing multi-tasking on a digital signal processor. For that purpose blocking functions are arranged such that they do not make use of a processor's hardware stack. Respective function calls are replaced with a piece of inline assembly code, which instead performs a branch to the correct routine for carrying out said function. If a blocking condition of the blocking function is encountered, a task switch can be done to resume another task. While the hardware stack is not used when a task switch might have to occur, mixed-up contents of the hardware stack among function calls performed by different tasks are avoided.

Apparatus and methods are disclosed for controlling execution of memory access instructions in a block-based processor architecture using a hardware structure that indicates a relative ordering of memory access instruction in an instruction block. In one example of the disclosed technology, a method of executing an instruction block having a plurality of memory load and/or memory store instructions includes selecting a next memory load or memory store instruction to execute based on dependencies encoded within the block, and on a store vector that stores data indicating which memory load and memory store instructions in the instruction block have executed. The store vector can be masked using a store mask. The store mask can be generated when decoding the instruction block, or copied from an instruction block header. Based on the encoded dependencies and the masked store vector, the next instruction can issue when its dependencies are available.

A method is provided for identifying a data transfer mismatch between a sender and a receiver from among units of a software simulator of a hardware processor. The simulator runs the plurality of the units which communicate with each other via First-In First-Outs (FIFOs). The method counts amounts of data the sender writes to the FIFOs and the receiver reads from the FIFOs for a given data transfer. The method avoids blocking during FIFO reading and writing operations by (i) reading dummy data by the receiver, even if the FIFOs are empty, when the receiver tries reading from the FIFOs, and (ii) discarding written data if the FIFOs are full, when the sender tries writing to the FIFOs. The method identifies mismatches in the amount of data the sender writes to the FIFOs versus the amount of data the receiver reads from the FIFOs for the given data transfer.

A method includes, in a pipeline of a processor, writing instructions of a single software thread that are pending for execution into a reorder buffer (ROB) in accordance with a single write position, and incrementing the single write position to point to a location in the ROB for a next instruction to be written. The instructions, which were written in accordance with the single write position, are removed from first and second different locations in the ROB, and the first and second locations are incremented.

Representative apparatus, method, and system embodiments are disclosed for configurable computing. A representative system includes an interconnection network; a processor; and a plurality of configurable circuit clusters. Each configurable circuit cluster includes a plurality of configurable circuits arranged in an array; a synchronous network coupled to each configurable circuit of the array; and an asynchronous packet network coupled to each configurable circuit of the array. A representative configurable circuit includes a configurable computation circuit and a configuration memory having a first, instruction memory storing a plurality of data path configuration instructions to configure a data path of the configurable computation circuit; and a second, instruction and instruction index memory storing a plurality of spoke instructions and data path configuration instruction indices for selection of a master synchronous input, a current data path configuration instruction, and a next data path configuration instruction for a next configurable computation circuit.

Embodiments of instructions are detailed herein including one or more of 1) a branch fence instruction, prefix, or variants (BFENCE); 2) a predictor fence instruction, prefix, or variants (PFENCE); 3) an exception fence instruction, prefix, or variants (EFENCE); 4) an address computation fence instruction, prefix, or variants (AFENCE); 5) a register fence instruction, prefix, or variants (RFENCE); and, additionally, modes that apply the above semantics to some or all ordinary instructions.