Patent ID: 11928474
Assignee: MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 0:
1. A processor, comprising:
an instruction processing circuit configured to process an instruction stream comprising a plurality of instructions in an instruction pipeline, the instruction processing circuit comprising:
a branch predictor circuit comprising a history register; and
a branch predictor update circuit configured to:
detect a loop comprising a plurality of loop instructions among the plurality of instructions in the instruction stream;
determine that the loop is stored within a loop buffer circuit of the processor;
determine a count of potential history register updates to the history register for the plurality of loop instructions;
determine whether the count of potential history register updates exceeds a size of the history register; and
responsive to determining that the count of potential history register updates does not exceed the size of the history register, update a branch predictor of the branch predictor circuit based on the plurality of loop instructions.