Patent ID: 7971030

Claim:
A method of execution-instruction delegation among multiple elemental processing resources of at least two different types, the multiple elemental processing resources comprising two or more elemental processing resources of a first type each sharing two or more elemental processing resources of a pipelined computational type with at least one other of the two or more processing resources of the first type, the processing resources of the first type each being configured to receive a non-delegated program instruction from a thread in memory that it can execute or delegate for execution by one computational type elemental processing resource, the processing resources of the computational type each being configured to only receive and execute instructions that were delegated to their pipeline for execution by processing resources of the first type and by being shared by at least two elemental processing resources of the first type, the method comprising: obtaining an execution instruction from the thread, wherein the execution instruction is obtained at one of the elemental processing resources of the first type; determining whether an operation-code within the execution instruction is incapable of being executed by the one elemental processing resource of the first type and thus should be delegated to one elemental processing resource of the computational type that the one elemental processing resource of the first type shares in common with another elemental processing resource of the first type; executing the execution instruction with the one elemental processing resource of the first type, if the operation-code within the execution instruction should not be delegated to any elemental processing resource of the computational type; if the execution instruction should be delegated, providing a specific elemental processing resource of the first type access to a specific computational type elemental processing resource it shares with another of the elemental processing resources of the first type based upon an arbitration request by the specific elemental processing resource of the first type; and routing the execution instruction and an identifier for the specific elemental processing resource of the first type that delegated the execution instruction to a pipeline of the specific elemental processing resource of the computational type that is shared in common and is capable of executing the operation code.