Reply To: Prediction

There are multiple branches but no deferred branches. Deferred branches were included once but we got rid of them ages ago. One can think of phasing as being a single-cycle deferral – however all branches phase the same way, whereas the essence of deferral is to support variable latency.

The basic problem with deferred branches is belt congruency. If the target of a branch is a join then the branch carries belt arguments giving what belt objects are to be passed to the target, and their belt order; multiple incoming branches carry the belt arguments to match the target’s belt signature. If we hoist a branch then an argument it wants to pass may not exist yet when the branch issues; conversely, if we restrict its arguments to those that pre-exist it then those may have fallen off the belt by the time the branch is taken. Of course, we could split the branch op into a (hoisted) branch part and an (unhoisted) argument part, but then the hoisted part is really no more than a prefetch.

It would still be possible to use a deferred branch when the target is not a join; in that case the target just inherits the belt as it is when the branch is taken. But such an op, and a prefetch op, wait on having big enough code sample (and enough free engineering time) to do serious measuring to see if they would pay.