The idea of straight-line traces goes back even further, to Josh Fisher's work on trace scheduling in compilers in the early 80s (linearizing one control-flow p

The idea of straight-line traces goes back even further, to Josh Fisher's work on trace scheduling in compilers in the early 80s (linearizing one control-flow path gives a much wider scope for optimizations): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Fisher#Trace_Scheduling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Fisher#Trace_Scheduling He combined this with a VLIW processor architecture to build Multiflow, a hardware startup. (Interesting history tidbit: Robert Colwell, who architected the P6, the first out-of-order Intel core, started his career at Multiflow before joining Intel. The P6 didn't have any trace-cache influences, but the P4, a few years later, infamously did...)