Transparent control independence (TCI)
Ahmed S. Al-Zawawi, Vimal K. Reddy, Eric Rotenberg, Haitham H. Akkary · 2007
Superscalar architectures have been proposed that exploit control independence, reducing the performance penalty of branch mispredictions by preserving the work of future misprediction-independent instructions. The essential goal of exploiting control independence is to completely decouple future misprediction-independent instructions from deferred misprediction-dependent instructions. Current implementations fall short of this goal because they explicitly maintain program order among misprediction-independent and misprediction-dependent instructions. Explicit approaches sacrifice design efficiency and ultimately performance.