Efficient Instruction Sequencing with Inline Target Insertion

The trend of deep pipelining and multiple instruction issue has made instruction sequencing an extremely critical issue. This paper defines Inline Target Insertion, a specific compiler and pipeline implementation method for Delayed Branches with Squashing. The method is shown to offer two important features not discovered in previous studies. First, branches inserted into branch slots are correctly executed. Second, the execution returns correctly from interrupts or exceptions with only one program counter. These two features make Inline Target Insertion a superior alternative (better performance and less software/hardware complexity) to the conventional delayed branching mechanisms.