Invention Application
- Patent Title: INSTRUCTION CACHE IN A MULTI-THREADED PROCESSOR
-
Application No.: US16276895Application Date: 2019-02-15
-
Publication No.: US20200210192A1Publication Date: 2020-07-02
- Inventor: Alan Graham Alexander , Simon Christian Knowles , Mrudula Chidambar Gore , Jonathan Louis Ferguson
- Applicant: Graphcore Limited
- Applicant Address: GB Bristol
- Assignee: Graphcore Limited
- Current Assignee: Graphcore Limited
- Current Assignee Address: GB Bristol
- Priority: com.zzzhc.datahub.patent.etl.us.BibliographicData$PriorityClaim@4c54947c
- Main IPC: G06F9/38
- IPC: G06F9/38 ; G06F9/30 ; G06F12/0875

Abstract:
A processor comprising: a barrel-threaded execution unit for executing concurrent threads, and a repeat cache shared between the concurrent threads. The processor's instruction set includes a repeat instruction which takes a repeat count operand. When the repeat cache is not claimed and the repeat instruction is executed in a first thread, a portion of code is cached from the first thread into the repeat cache, the state of the repeat cache is changed to record it as claimed, and the cached code is executed a number of times. When the repeat instruction is then executed in a further thread, then the already-cached portion of code is again executed a respective number of times, each time from the repeat cache. For each of the first and further instructions, the repeat count operand in the respective instruction specifies the number of times to execute the cached code.
Public/Granted literature
Information query