Methods and apparatus for minimizing the impact of

专利名称：Methods and apparatus for minimizing the

impact of excessive instruction retrieval

发明人：Rahul Razdan,Edward John McLellan申请号：US09200247申请日：19981125公开号：US06446143B1公开日：20020903

专利附图：

摘要：A technique controls memory access requests. The technique involves acquiringa first series of requests including a prefetch request for performing a prefetchoperation that prefetches a first set of instructions from a memory, and adding a first

entry in a request queue in response to the prefetch request. The first entry identifiesthe prefetch operation. The technique further involves attempting to retrieve a secondset of instructions from a cache to create a cache miss, and generating, in response to thecache miss, a second series of requests including a fetch request for performing a fetchoperation that fetches the second set of instructions from the memory to satisfy thecache miss. The technique further involves acquiring the second series of requests thatincludes the fetch request, and adding a second entry in the request queue in responseto the fetch request. The second entry identifies the fetch operation. The techniquefurther involves invalidating the first entry in the request queue when the fetch request isacquired before the prefetch operation initiates, and maintaining the first entry in validform in the request queue and performing the prefetch operation to completion whenthe fetch request is acquired after the prefetch operation initiates.

申请人：COMPAQ INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES GROUP, L.P.

代理机构：Hamilton, Brook, Smith & Reynolds, P.C.

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