80960KA Datasheet, PDF (8/43 Pages) Intel Corporation – EMBEDDED 32-BIT MICROPROCESSOR

80960KA
purpose registers provided in other popular micropro-
cessors. The term global refers to the fact that these
registers retain their contents across procedure calls.
The local registers, on the other hand, are procedure
specific. For each procedure call, the 80960KA
allocates 16 local registers (R0 through R15). Each
local register is 32 bits wide.
1.1.4. Multiple Register Sets
To further increase the efficiency of the register set,
multiple sets of local registers are stored on-chip (See
Figure 4). This cache holds up to four local register
frames, which means that up to three procedure calls
can be made without having to access the procedure
stack resident in memory.
Although programs may have procedure calls nested
many calls deep, a program typically oscillates back
and forth between only two to three levels. As a
result, with four stack frames in the cache, the proba-
bility of having a free frame available on the cache
when a call is made is very high. In fact, runs of repre-
sentative C-language programs show that 80% of the
calls are handled without needing to access memory.
If four or more procedures are active and a new
procedure is called, the 80960KA moves the oldest
local register set in the stack-frame cache to a
procedure stack in memory to make room for a new
set of registers. Global register G15 is the frame
pointer (FP) to the procedure stack.
Global registers are not exchanged on a procedure
call, but retain their contents, making them available
to all procedures for fast parameter passing.
1.1.5. Instruction Cache
To further reduce memory accesses, the 80960KA
includes a 512-byte on-chip instruction cache. The
instruction cache is based on the concept of locality
of reference; most programs are not usually executed
in a steady stream but consist of many branches,
loops and procedure calls that lead to jumping back
and forth in the same small section of code. Thus, by
maintaining a block of instructions in cache, the
number of memory references required to read
instructions into the processor is greatly reduced.
To load the instruction cache, instructions are fetched
in 16-byte blocks; up to four instructions can be
fetched at one time. An efficient prefetch algorithm
increases the probability that an instruction will
already be in the cache when it is needed.
Code for small loops often fits entirely within the
cache, leading to a great increase in processing
speed since further memory references might not be
necessary until the program exits the loop. Similarly,
when calling short procedures, the code for the
calling procedure is likely to remain in the cache so it
will be there on the procedure’s return.
1.1.6. Register Scoreboarding
The instruction decoder is optimized in several ways.
One optimization method is the ability to overlap
instructions by using register scoreboarding.
Register scoreboarding occurs when a LOAD moves
a variable from memory into a register. When the
instruction initiates, a scoreboard bit on the target
register is set. Once the register is loaded, the bit is
reset. In between, any reference to the register
contents is accompanied by a test of the scoreboard
bit to ensure that the load has completed before
processing continues. Since the processor does not
need to wait for the LOAD to complete, it can execute
additional instructions placed between the LOAD and
the instruction that uses the register contents, as
shown in the following example:
ld data_2, r4
ld data_2, r5
Unrelated instruction
Unrelated instruction
add R4, R5, R6
In essence, the two unrelated instructions between
LOAD and ADD are executed “for free” (i.e., take no
apparent time to execute) because they are executed
while the register is being loaded. Up to three load
instructions can be pending at one time with three
corresponding scoreboard bits set. By exploiting this
feature, system programmers and compiler writers
have a useful tool for optimizing execution speed.
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