Processor cluster implementing conditional instruction skip
A system and method include identifying a conditional skip instruction, determining when a conditional skip instruction is satisfied according to a result of an associated compare function, and skipping a fixed-number of the instructions defined by the conditional skip instruction when the conditional skip function is satisfied.
1 . A method for executing instructions comprising:
identifying a conditional skip instruction;
determining when a conditional skip instruction is satisfied according to a result of an associated comparison function; and
skipping a fixed-number of the instructions defined by the conditional skip instruction when the conditional skip function is satisfied.
2 . The method of claim 1 including performing the compare function in response to executing the conditional skip instruction.
3 . The method of claim 2 wherein the result of the compare function includes a Boolean value that indicates when the next instruction or instructions should be skipped.
4 . The method of claim 1 including
comparing two data values in the compare function in response to executing the conditional skip instruction; and
setting a skip-next register according to a result of the comparison.
5 . The method of claim 4 including determining when the conditional skip instruction is satisfied according to the skip-next register.
6 . The method of claim 4 including setting a bit in the skip-next register when one of the data values satisfies the comparison function to another data value.
7 . The method of claim 1 including automatically skipping one instruction when the conditional skip instruction is satisfied.
8 . The method of claim 1 including
determining the conditional skip instruction is not satisfied according to the result of the predicate function; and
executing a next instruction when the conditional skip instruction is not satisfied.
9 . A system comprising:
a semantic code table populated with instructions including at least one conditional skip instruction; and
a semantic processing unit configured to skip a fixed-number of instructions according to the conditional skip instruction.
10 . The system of claim 9 including a direct execution parser causing the semantic processing unit to execute one or more conditional skip instructions stored within the semantic code table.
11 . The system of claim 9 including a plurality of semantic processing units, each configured to execute conditional skip instructions from the semantic code table.
12 . The system of claim 11 including a dispatcher configured to provide at least one conditional skip instruction from the semantic code table to the semantic processing units.
13 . The system of claim 9 wherein the semantic processing unit skips one instruction according to the conditional skip instruction.