Home > Term: chaining
chaining
A hardware feature of some pipeline architectures that allows the result of an operation to be used immediately as an operand for a second operation, simultaneously with the writing of the result to its destination register. The total cycle time of two chained operations is less than the sum of the stand-alone cycle times for the instructions. For example, the TI 8847 supports chaining of consecutive fadd, fsub, and fmul (of the same precision). Chained faddd/fmuld requires 12 cycles, while consecutive unchained faddd/fmuld requires 17 cycles.
- Part of Speech: noun
- Industry/Domain: Computer
- Category: Workstations
- Company: Sun
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Creator
- Shemayah
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