Patent ID: 7613192

Claim:
A reordering device comprising: a reorder buffer to store information relating to data items, each of the data items being associated with a sequence number chosen from a sequence number space that includes three possible regions, where processing of each of the data items, by the reorder engine, depends on which of the three possible regions is associated with each of the data items, the sequence number indicating a relative order of the data items; a reorder buffer pointer to store a value indicating a rearmost active entry of the reorder buffer relative to the sequence number space; and a reorder engine to receive the data items, the reorder engine classifying each of the received data items into one of the three possible regions based on the sequence number of the data item and the value of the reorder buffer pointer, the reorder engine determining whether to store the information relating to the received data items in the reorder buffer based on the region into which each of the received data items is classified.