METHODS AND APPARATUS TO SUPPORT CONDITIONAL EXECUTION IN A VLIW-BASED ARRAY PROCESSOR WITH SUBWORD EXECUTION

摘要

General purpose flags (ACFs) (571 or 561) are defined and encoded utilizing a hierarchical one, two, three-bits encoding. Each added bit provides a superset of the previous functionality. With condition combination, a sequential series of conditional branches based on complex conditions may be avoided and complex conditions can then be used for conditional execution. ACF generation (578 or 568) can be specified by the programmer. By varying the number of flags affected, conditional operation parallelism can be widely varied, for example, from mono-processing to octal-processing in VLIW execution, and across an array of processing elements (PEs). Multiple PEs can generate condition information at the same time with the programmer being able to specify a conditional execution in one processor based upon condition generated in a different processor using the communication interface between the processing elements to transfer the conditions. Each processor in a multiple processor array may independently have different units conditionally operate based upon their ACFs.