GENERAL PURPOSE COMPOUND APPARATUS FOR INSTRUCTION-LEVEL PARALLEL PROCESSORS

摘要

The disclosure deals with a technique for generating compound instructions from a binary instruction stream without knowledge as to where instructions start or which bytes contain data instead of instruction. The disclosure describes pre-processing a set of instructions (or a program) to determine statically which instructions may be combined into compound instructions. Such processing is done in a typical embodiment by software and/or hardware means which will look for classes of instructions that can be executed in parallel in a particular computer system configuration. The instruction classes and the compounding rules are implementation specific and will vary depending on the number and type of functional execution units. While keeping their original sequence and object code intact, individual instructions are selectively grouped and combined with one or more other adjacent scalar instructions to form a compound instruction byte stream having both compounded scalar instructions for parallel execution and non-compounded scalar instructions for execution singly. Control information is appended to identify information relevant to the execution of the compound instructions.