It isn't bound by the pipeline length. Even without pipelining at all, with poisoning you can do a faulting load into a register and then just mark the value i

It isn't bound by the pipeline length. Even without pipelining at all, with poisoning you can do a faulting load into a register and then just mark the value in the register as poisoned. As you perform operations with the value any results are also poisoned. Then maybe dozens or hundreds of cycles later when you store or branch on one of the poisoned values the fault occurs. So pipeline length really doesn't have anything to do with it. On Itanium you essentially had to double check your values for poison before operating on them in a lot of cases and that caused big performance penalties on conventional code. Other systems restrict the shenanigans you can get up to with your MMU and solve the problem that way but that means you can't run a traditional OS with mmaped files and memory paging and such. I'm not sure what the Tachyum people are doing or if they've got some clever idea to get around all of this.