Mill Computing, Inc. Forums The Mill Architecture Execution Reply To: Execution

Ivan Godard
Keymaster
Post count: 689

To expand a bit on Will’s answer, and introduce some terminology for the glossary (you there, Mill-fan-registered-as-“imbecile”?).

CPUs that do not expose the pipeline go to great lengths to support the illusion that instructions are executed one-by-one to completion. They must be able to unwind absolutely any action, completed or not, in the event of an interrupt or other event that lets the program see state. The unwind goes back to just before the first incomplete (unretired) operation; everything after that, done or not, is discarded and has to be done over. This approach is called execution replay (or sometimes issue replay.

No modern machine actually has one-at-a-time execution internally, and an exposed pipeline machine like the Mill does not even pretend that it does. IBM 7094 semantics are so 1960, after all. Instead, we let all operations run to completion, save the results, and on restart we inject the saved results with the same timing and semantics that would have occurred had the interrupt not happened. This approach is called result replay.

Result replay has real advantages over issue replay: you never have to recompute things. Moreover, while you have to save the in-flight state if an interrupt happens, you don’t have to save all the state all the time in case an interrupt might happen. And the state is a lot smaller, too.