Year: 1992
Type: article
Abstract: We present a state property called congruence and show how it can be used to demonstrate commutivity of instructions in a modern load--store architecture. Our analysis is particularly important in pipelined microprocessors where instructions are frequently reordered to avoid costly delays in execution caused by hazards. Our work has significant implications to safety and security critical applications since reordering can easily change the meaning and an instruction sequence and current techniques are largely ad hoc. Our work is done in a mechanical theorem prover and results in a set of trustworthy rules for instruction reordering. The mechanization makes it practical to analyze the entire instruction set. 1 Introduction. Instruction pipelining 1 is critical to good performance in modern microprocessors. Almost every microprocessor developed in the last several years contains an instruction pipeline. Significant attention has been given to the development of scheduling algo...
Author: Phillip J. Windley
Institution: University of Idaho
Language: English
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: U.S. Department of Defense
OpenAlex ID: W751021468