Patent ID: 7240164

Claim:
A method comprising: processing units of data associated with a dependent data stream using different threads of execution, the threads to execute on a processor configured to operate as a data processing pipeline of stages, each comprising a set of the threads, and corresponding threads in the sets of threads processing the same one of the data units in the stages; and accessing a common data structure in a memory for the processing, using a single read operation to read the common data structure from the memory for caching and a write operation to write back a cached version of the common data structure to the memory; wherein each of the stages is processed in a read phase comprising the single read operation and a modify-write phase comprising the write operation, the modify-write phase comprises a thread in a current stage providing context information to a register of a next stage and the thread in the current stage alerting a corresponding thread in the next stage of an availability of the context information in the register of the next stage.