Patent ID: 7290092

Claim:
An apparatus for accessing a storage structure, said apparatus comprising: an arrangement for providing a storage access instruction; an arrangement for inputting an address into a storage structure data cache responsive to a storage access instruction; an arrangement for extending a storage access instruction with a predicted register number field, the predicted register number field containing a predicted register number corresponding to a speculative location of a load/store operand associated with a storage access instruction, wherein the predicted register number comprises: an associative set index; a way number within a set; and, an offset within a line; an arrangement for speculatively accessing a storage structure with a storage access instruction extended by said extending arrangement, on a per-instruction basis, thereby allowing access to the load/store operand as soon as the instruction is available and precluding a need for a table lookup, an associative search, or address computation or translation; and an arrangement for reverting to said arrangement for inputting an address if the load/store operand is not in the speculative location; wherein the storage structure is the data cache, and the speculative location is a speculative cache array location.