Reply To: Execution

I see where we led you astray. The slide intends to show the “brtr” as the principle cycle (i.e. compute phase) of the instruction containing the brtr; the branch would happen in the following cycle, along with the add, or more correctly at the boundary leading to the add. That is, the slide describes instructions, and tries to show how they are spread out over the phases so as to overlap.

It’s very hard to come up with lucid and unambiguous pictures for this, even with the animations to help. I don’t know how the slide could be improved; just putting it in terms of phases from the start and showing how those turn into instructions, as you interpreted it, would be just as confusing but in the opposite way.

Perhaps a color coding, with one color to represent the op as an instruction and another to represent it in phase as executed? That would work for the con, but now there would be two “brtr”s and the other ops, and the clutter would be confusing too 🙁

If any of you readers have access to PowerPoint I would welcome sample slides that you feel explain this better. Don’t worry about the color scheme, but use whatever you think looks nice.