more talking to the press.

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Thu Nov 13 16:05:24 2003

On Nov 13, 0:29, Eric Smith wrote:
> > Notice to all: I'm claiming an extra geek point because this entire
> > message
> > makes perfect sense to me. --Patrick
>
> OK, then I claim two extra geek points for having written it.

Then I get three because I understood it, and can think of processors
that do it -- and a few more because I've not only got some (MIPS
R4600, R5K and R10K) but I know how to tell them what the best guess is
(they have forms of branch instruction that can be tagged in assembler
as "likely" or "not likely", to modify the internal branch prediction
mechanism).

The Pentium can do speculative execution as well, and one version even
did a fetch of both branches, but only a pre-fetch, not execution.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York

Received on Thu Nov 13 2003 - 16:05:24 GMT