Patent ID: 7149883

Claim:
A method including: in a queue, writing a first microinstruction of a plurality of microinstructions from a trace to a first location indicated by a write pointer, the plurality of microinstructions from a trace being written to the queue as a set of a predetermined number of microinstructions, and the first microinstruction of the plurality of microinstructions includes one of a valid state and an invalid state, wherein the trace of microinstructions comprises a head entry, the head entry comprising a linear address to determine a set of subsequent entries in the trace; making a qualitative determination whether or not to retain the first microinstruction within the queue based on the state of the first microinstruction; if the first microinstruction includes the valid state then the qualitative determination is to retain the first microinstruction and the write pointer is advanced to indicate a second location within the queue into which to write a second microinstruction; and if the first microinstruction includes the invalid state then the qualitative determination is not to retain the first microinstruction and the write pointer is maintained to indicate the first location within the queue into which to write the second microinstruction, so that the first microinstruction is overwritten by the second microinstruction.