Invention Grant
- Patent Title: Branch target buffer for a data processing apparatus
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Application No.: US16483198Application Date: 2018-02-01
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Publication No.: US11269641B2Publication Date: 2022-03-08
- Inventor: Rakesh Kumar , Boris Grot , Vijay Nagarajan , Cheng Chieh Huang
- Applicant: THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
- Applicant Address: GB Edinburgh
- Assignee: THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
- Current Assignee: THE UNIVERSITY COURT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
- Current Assignee Address: GB Edinburgh
- Agency: Dickinson Wright PLLC
- Priority: GB1701841 20170203
- International Application: PCT/GB2018/050294 WO 20180201
- International Announcement: WO2018/142140 WO 20180809
- Main IPC: G06F9/38
- IPC: G06F9/38 ; G06F9/30

Abstract:
A data processing apparatus is provided having branch prediction circuitry, the branch prediction circuitry having a Branch Target Buffer, BTB. A fetch target queue receives entries corresponding to a sequence of instruction addresses, at least one of the sequence having been predicted using the branch prediction circuitry. A fetch engine is provided to fetch instruction addresses taken from a top of the fetch target queue whilst a prefetch engine sends a prefetch probe to an instruction cache. The BTB is to detect a BTB miss when attempting to populate a storage slot of the fetch target queue and the BTB triggers issuance of a BTB miss probe to the memory to fetch at least one instruction from the memory to resolve the BTB miss using branch-prediction based prefetching.
Public/Granted literature
- US20200004543A1 BRANCH TARGET BUFFER FOR A DATA PROCESSING APPARATUS Public/Granted day:2020-01-02
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