The design of a non-blocking load processor architecture

We have extended a single-issue pipelined implementation of SPARC with mechanisms to support non-blocking load instructions and analyzed it with respect to speed and complexity. We present the functionality of the non-blocking load scheme as well as a detailed implementation analysis of it. We find that it is possible to implement the non-blocking load mechanisms without significantly complicating the pipeline design and with no increase of the processor cycle time. This is mainly because the non-blocking load mechanisms can work in parallel with the ALU, the registerfile, and the cache memories-datapath components that often establish the critical path in a pipelined processor.