Patent ID: 7331039

Claim:
A method for graphically tracking a progression of instructions through one or more hardware components, comprising: defining a plurality of graphical icons for a plurality of instructions of a code segment, each of the plurality of graphical icons having a displayable appearance that identifies a type of instruction; tracking each of the plurality of graphical icons when simulating execution of the code segment through the one or more hardware components by generating a graphical display of a plurality of execution pipelines, each of which has indicia associated therewith that differs from the indicia associated with the remaining pipelines of said plurality of execution pipelines and placing a subset of said plurality of graphical icons adjacent to a first sub-portion of said indicia associated with one of said plurality of execution pipelines; and displaying a progression of each of the plurality of graphical icons through the one or more hardware components during the execution of the code segment by sequentially placing graphical icons of said subset adjacent to additional sub-portions of said indicia associated with said one of said plurality of execution pipelines.