Operation
The scheduler in a Pentium 4 processor is so aggressive that it will send operations for execution without a guarantee that they can be successfully executed. (Among other things, the scheduler assumes all data is in level 1 CPU cache.) The most common reason execution fails is that the requisite data is not available, which itself is most likely due to a cache miss. When this happens, the replay system springs into action. The replay system signals the scheduler to stop, and then repeatedly executes the failed string of dependent operations until they have completed successfully.
Read more about this topic: Replay System
Famous quotes containing the word operation:
“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)