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This thesis proposes a method to design the decoder architecture, for decoding and translating X86 instructions to RISC-like instructions. Thedecoder architecture augments X86 instruction level parallelism to the processor and produces more micro operation outputs. This decoder contains a prefetcher, a predecoder, a predecoded instruction buffer and instruction converters with guarded-execution instructions. We adopt some different strategy in the prefetcher to fetch instructions from instruction cache. When the instruction path contains a conditional branch instruction with forward and short distance target, the prefetcher will be do less job than an ordinary prefetcher. This strategy will accommodate converters with guarded-execution instructions. We use a behavior simulation with real X86 instruction codes. The evaluation results show that the proposed translating architecture can translate more instructions every cycle.
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