Apparatus for resolving a variable number of potential memory access conflicts in a pipeline computer system and method therefor

• Main Authors: HETHERINGTON, RICKEY C, MURRAY, JOHN E, FOSSUM, TRYGGVE, FITE, DAVID B, WEBB, DAVID A., JR
• Format: Patent
• Language: English; French; German
• Published: 09.09.1998
• Edition: 6
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; PHYSICS

An operand processing unit delivers a specified address and at least one read/write signal in response to an instruction being a source or destination operand, and delivers the source operand to an execution unit in response to completion of the preprocessing. The execution unit receives the source operand, executes it and delivers the resultant data to memory. A "write queue" receives the write addresses of the destination operands from the operand processing unit, stores the write addresses, and delivers the stored preselected addresses to memory in response to receiving the resultant data corresponding to the preselected address. The addresses of the source operand is compared to the write addresses stored in the write queue, and the operand processing unit is stalled whenever at least one of the write addresses in the write queue is equivalent to the read address. Therefore, fetching of the operand is delayed until the corresponding resultant data has been delivered by the execution unit.