DYNAMIC PIPELINE THROTTLING USING CONFIDENCE-BASED WEIGHTING OF IN-FLIGHT BRANCH INSTRUCTIONS

摘要

Systems and methods for operating a processor include determining confidence levels, such as high, low, and medium confidence levels, associated with in-flight branch instructions in an instruction pipeline of the processor, based on counters used for predicting directions of the in-flight branch instructions. Numbers of in-flight branch instructions associated with each of confidence levels are determined. A weighted sum of the numbers weighted with weights corresponding to the confidence levels is calculated and the weighted sum is compared with a threshold. A throttling signal may be asserted to indicate that instructions are to be throttled in a pipeline stage of the instruction pipeline based on the comparison.