1.3 What is an R10000 Microprocessor?
Branch Unit
The branch unit has the following characteristics:
- it allows one branch per cycle
- conditional branches can be executed speculatively, up to 4-deep
- it has a 44-bit adder to compute branch addresses
- it has a 4-quadword branch-resume buffer, used for reversing mispredicted speculatively-taken branches
- the Branch Link Quadword contains four instructions following a subroutine call, for rapid use when returning from leaf subroutines
- it has program trace RAM that stores the program counter for each instruction in the pipeline
Copyright 1995, MIPS Technologies, Inc. -- 29 JAN 96
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