Patent ID: 7051221

Claim:
A microprocessor, comprising: a set of data processing functional blocks including a first data processing functional block; a power saving circuit associated with the first data processing functional block and configured to reduce power consumption by the first data processing functional block in response to processing activity in the first data processing functional block being below an activity threshold; and a thermal control unit configured to receive an over temperature signal indicative of a processor temperature exceeding a temperature threshold and further configured to selectively force processing activity in the first data processing functional block to decrease below the activity threshold, wherein the thermal control unit is configured to force processing activity below the activity threshold by activating a functional block control unit configured to reduce the processing activity of the first data processing functional block; wherein the functional block control unit includes means selected from the group of means consisting of means for halting the prefetching of instructions and data, means for halting speculative execution, means for preventing the formation of instruction groups exceeding a single instruction, means for forcing a retry of selected instructions including memory reference instructions, means for flushing the processor after N instructions have executed where N is an integer greater than zero, means for reducing the depth of a processing queue within the functional block, means for disabling access to portions of a data cache, and means for reducing the number of available rename registers thereby reducing out-of-order execution.