Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
Glossary-13
can be said to occupy both the complete and execute stages in the
same clock cycle.
Stall
. An occurrence when an instruction cannot proceed to the next stage.
Static branch prediction
. Mechanism by which software (for example,
compilers) can hint to the machine hardware about the direction a
branch is likely to take.
Static memory
. Memory that assumes a reasonable degree of locality and
that the data is needed several times over a relatively long period.
Superscalar machine
. A machine that can issue multiple instructions
concurrently from a conventional linear instruction stream.
Supervisor mode
. The privileged operation state of a processor. In
supervisor mode, software, typically the operating system, can
access all control registers and can access the supervisor memory
space, among other privileged operations.
Synchronization.
A process to ensure that operations occur strictly
in order
.
See
Context synchronization and Execution synchronization.
Synchronous exception.
An
exception
that is generated by the execution of
a particular instruction or instruction sequence. There are two types
of synchronous exceptions,
precise
and
imprecise
.
System memory.
The physical memory available to a processor.
Tenure
. A tenure consists of three phases: arbitration, transfer, termination.
There can be separate address bus tenures and data bus tenures.
TLB (translation lookaside buffer)
A cache that holds recently-used
page
table entries
.
Throughput
. The measure of the number of instructions that are processed
per clock cycle.
Transaction
. A complete exchange between two bus devices. A transaction
is typically comprised of an address tenure and one or more data
tenures, which may overlap or occur separately from the address
tenure. A transaction may be minimally comprised of an address
tenure only.
Transfer termination
. Signal that refers to both signals that acknowledge the
transfer of individual beats (of both single-beat transfer and
individual beats of a burst transfer) and to signals that mark the end
of the tenure.
T