Software Pipelining - IA-64 Implementation

IA-64 Implementation

Intel's IA-64 architecture provides an example of an architecture designed with the difficulties of software pipelining in mind. Some of the architectural support for software pipelining includes:

• A "rotating" register bank; instructions can refer to a register number that is redirected to a different register each iteration of the loop (eventually looping back around to the beginning). This makes the extra instructions inserted in the previous example unnecessary.
• Predicates (used to "predicate" instructions; see Branch predication) that take their value from special looping instructions. These predicates turn on or off certain instructions in the loop, making a separate prologue and epilogue unnecessary.