Completing execution of one phase of a computer program before scheduling any instructions for the next phase

摘要

A program for a microprocessor, such as a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) graphics processing unit, is divided into separate phases. The processor schedules the instructions in one phase and waits for all the instructions in that phase to complete before scheduling the instructions in the next phase. The instructions may be scheduled on multiple threads, each thread processing one or more data instances. The processor may initialise a counter to the number of threads being executed in the program phase and decrement the counter each time a thread completes. In this case, the processor schedules the next phase of the program when the counter reaches zero. The number of threads used for a given phase may be configured dynamically based on the results of the preceding phase.