Inventors:
Sailesh Kottapalli - Milpitas CA, US
Udo Walterscheidt - San Jose CA, US
Andrew Sun - Santa Clara CA, US
Thomas Yeh - Cupertino CA, US
Kinkee Sit - Sunnyvale CA, US
Assignee:
Intel Corporation - Santa Clara CA
International Classification:
G06F 9/38
Abstract:
A method and apparatus for improving dispersal performance of instruction threads is described. In one embodiment, the dispersal logic determines whether the instructions supplied to it include any NOP instructions. When a NOP instruction is detected, the dispersal logic places the NOP into a no-op port for execution. All other instructions are distributed to the proper execution pipes in a normal manner. Because the NOP instructions do not use the execution resources of other instructions, all instruction threads can be executed in one cycle.