An apparatus is described with support for transactional memory and load/store-exclusive instructions using an exclusive monitor indication to track exclusive access to a given address. In response to a predetermined type of load instruction specifying a load target address, which is executed within a given transaction, any exclusive monitor indication previously set for the load target address is cleared. In response to a load-exclusive instruction, an abort is triggered for a transaction for which the given address is specified as one of its working set of addresses. This helps to maintain mutual exclusion between transactional and non-transactional threads even if there is load speculation in the non-transactional thread.

The invention relates to a method for processing instructions out-of-order on a processor comprising an arrangement of execution units. The inventive method comprises: 1) looking up operand sources in a Register Positioning Table and setting operand input references of the instruction to be issued accordingly; 2) checking for an Execution Unit (EXU) available for receiving a new instruction; and 3) issuing the instruction to the available Execution Unit and enter a reference of the result register addressed by the instruction to be issued to the Execution Unit into the Register Positioning Table (RPT).

Pre-fetching instructions for tasks of an operating system (OS) is provided by calling a task scheduler that determines a load start time for a set of instructions for a particular task corresponding to a task switch condition. The OS calls, and in response to the load start time, a loader entity module that generates a pre-fetch request that loads the set of instructions for the particular task from a non-volatile memory circuit into a random access memory circuit. The OS calls the task scheduler to switch to the particular task.

A task control circuit maintains, in response to task event information, a task information queue that includes task information for a plurality of tasks. Based upon the task information in the task information queue, a future task switch condition is identified as corresponding to a task switch time for a particular task of the plurality of tasks. A load start time is determined for a set of instructions for the particular task. A pre-fetch request is generated to load the set of instructions for the particular task into the memory circuit. The pre-fetch request is forwarded to a hardware loader circuit. In response to the task switch time, a task event trigger is generated for the particular task. The hardware loader circuit is used to load, in response to the pre-fetch request, the set of instructions from a non-volatile memory into the memory circuit.

Devices and techniques for asynchronous pipeline merging are described herein. An apparatus, includes a memory controller, which includes merge circuitry; where the memory controller chiplet is configured to perform operations including those to: perform a bitwise logical operation on a first logging bit vector and a second logging bit vector to obtain a result vector, wherein the first logging bit vector is associated with a first pipeline and the second logging bit vector is associated with a second pipeline, and wherein bits in respective index positions of the first and second logging bit vectors represent transactions; select a completed transaction from the result vector using a round-robin technique; and forward the completed transaction from the set of completed transactions to an output pipeline.

A cache system, having cache sets, a connection to a line identifying an execution type, a connection to a line identifying a status of speculative execution, and a logic circuit that can: allocate a first subset of cache sets when the execution type is a first type indicating non-speculative execution, allocate a second subset when the execution type changes from the first type to a second type indicating speculative execution, and reserve a cache set when the execution type is the second type. When the execution type changes from the second to the first type and the status of speculative execution indicates that a result of speculative execution is to be accepted, the logic circuit can reconfigure the second subset when the execution type is the first type; and allocate the at least one cache set when the execution type changes from the first to the second type.

Performing speculative address translation in processor-based devices is disclosed herein. In one exemplary embodiment, a processor-based device provides a processing element (PE) that defines a speculative translation instruction such as an enqueue instruction for offloading operations to a peripheral device. The speculative translation instruction references a plurality of bytes including one or more virtual memory addresses. After receiving the speculative translation instruction, an instruction decode stage of an execution pipeline circuit of the PE transmits a request for address translation of the virtual memory address to a memory management unit (MMU) of the PE. The MMU then performs speculative address translation of the virtual memory address into a corresponding translated memory address. In some embodiments, any address translation errors encountered are raised to an appropriate exception level, and may be raised synchronously or asynchronously with respect to an operation performed when the speculative translation instruction is executed.

Embodiments are provided for an integrated semi-inclusive hierarchical metadata predictor. A hit in a second-level structure is determined, the hit being associated with a line of metadata in the second-level structure. Responsive to determining that a victim line of metadata in a first-level structure meets at least one condition, the victim line of metadata is stored in the second-level structure. The line of metadata from the second-level structure is stored in a first-level structure to be utilized to facilitate performance of a processor, the line of metadata from the second-level structure including entries for a plurality of instructions.

Techniques relating to register file prefetch are described. In an embodiment, execution circuitry causes issuance of a prefetch request to copy data from a data cache unit to a register file. Other embodiments are also disclosed and claimed.

A system, processor, programming product and/or method including: an instruction dispatch unit configured to dispatch instructions of a compare immediate-conditional branch instruction sequence; and a compare register having at least one entry to hold information in a plurality of fields. Operations include: writing information from a first instruction of the compare immediate-conditional branch instruction sequence into one or more of the plurality of fields in an entry in the compare register; writing an immediate field and the ITAG of a compare immediate instruction into the entry in the compare register; writing, in response to dispatching a conditional branch instruction, an inferred compare result value into the entry in the compare register; comparing a computed compare result value to the inferred compare result value stored in the entry in the compare register; and not execute the compare immediate instruction or the conditional branch instruction.