User’s Manual

IBM PowerPC 750GX and 750GL RISC Microprocessor

8.2.2.2 Speculative Loads and Conditional Branches

Loads that are dispatched before a preceding conditional branch is resolved are speculative. Mispredicted branches cause the speculative loads to be canceled. Normally, the cancellation is confined to the load/store unit, and no additional cycles are wasted. However, this is not the case when MuM is enabled. The speculative loads might be MuM requests that have started on the 60x bus. All outstanding MuM requests must complete, since there is no way to cancel them once they are started on the 60x bus. The load/store unit is now stalled until all outstanding loads have completed. The data cache is not reloaded for any MuM request that is canceled. However, the MuM reload is loaded into the L2 cache if enabled.

8.3 Address-Bus Tenure

This section describes the three phases of the address tenure—address-bus arbitration, address transfer, and address termination.

8.3.1 Address-Bus Arbitration

When the 750GX needs access to the external bus and it is not parked (BG is negated), it asserts the bus request (BR) signal until it is granted mastership of the bus and the bus is available (see Figure 8-6). The external arbiter must grant master-elect status to the potential master by asserting the bus grant (BG) signal. The 750GX requesting the bus determines that the bus is available when the ABB input is negated. When the address bus is not busy (ABB input is negated), BG is asserted and the address retry (ARTRY) input is negated. This is referred to as a qualified bus grant. The potential master assumes address-bus mastership by asserting ABB when it receives a qualified bus grant.

Figure 8-6. Address-Bus Arbitration

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Logical Bus Clock

need_bus

BR

bg

abb

artry

qual BG

ABB

Bus Interface Operation

gx_08.fm.(1.2)

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March 27, 2006