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I had a question - the author states: >"The most obvious is the instruction decoder, which is near the start of the pipeline, and is responsible (in the looses
by bogomipz 8y ago
I had a question - the author states:
>"The most obvious is the instruction decoder, which is near the start of the pipeline, and is responsible (in the loosest possible terms) for passing the inputs to each of the execution units."
Why would it "in the loosest possible terms"? Isn't this "precisely" the job of the decoder?
- kabdib 8y agoIIRC in many chips the decoder stage translates native instructions into micro-ops, which are RISC-like and the main food for execution units. The translation is not necessarily a simple one (one native instruction is often more than one micro-op, and it's possible to collapse multiple native instructions -- especially stuff like prefixes -- into one or more micro-ops).
- bogomipz 8y agoAh OK that make sense. This is likely what the authors means here by "loosely." Cheers.