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What happens if you have an FMA instruction but fail to also issue an Args? Or is it that the existence of an Args in an instruction turns the multiply operation into a FMA operation?
Am I right in guessing that which operations are connected to which in ganging is a result of which slot in the instruction the ops occupy?
Decode never needs to look at an adjacent slot to disambiguate an operations; needing to do so would complicate and slow down decode. Consequently FMA is a distinct opcode and not a mul-with-baggage.
The sanity check for ganging (at least on the exu side where these ops live) is done during execution. The FMA functional unit knows that it needs arguments from its buddy, but it has the execution cycle to work out whether or know it has a buddy with the right arguments. No buddy causes an invalidOperation fault, even though the decoder proper didn’t complain.
Gangs are always encoded in adjacent slots. Otherwise there are encoding issues and added data paths to get everything to the FU involved.