Patent ID: 7827325

Claim:
An apparatus for speculative packet transmission, the apparatus comprising: a credit-based flow control interconnect device initiates speculative transmission of a Transaction Layer Packet (TLP) from a first PCIe device to a second PCIe device if a number of available flow control (FC) credits on said first PCIe device is less than a number of flow control credits required by a remote receive buffer to accept the TLP and greater than a threshold value of a minimum number of FC credits, otherwise waiting for additional number of flow control credits, wherein the credit-based flow control interconnect device checks, substantially immediate prior to utilization of all flow control credits that were initially available at commencement of the speculative transmission, whether or not an updated number of available flow control credits is sufficient for completing the transmission; an interconnect link layer transmits said TLP to said second PCIe device if said additional number of FC credits required to complete transmission of said TLP become available to said first PCIe device before said speculative transmission is completed, otherwise said first PCIe device aborts said speculative transmission and nullifies any packet data already sent; wherein said second PCIe device advertises the available capacity of its receive buffer in terms of FC credits to said first PCIe device; and wherein said threshold is a percentage of a number of FC credits required for transmission of said TLP, a predefined number, or a number corresponding to a particular type of packet.