Precise Exceptions in Asynchronous Processors

Rajit Manohar, Mika Nyström, and Alain J. Martin

The presence of precise exceptions in a processor leads to complications in its design. Some recent processor architectures have sacrificed this requirement for performance reasons at the cost of software complexity. We present an implementation strategy for precise exceptions in asynchronous processors that does not block the instruction fetch when exceptions do not occur; the cost of the exception handling mechanism is only encountered when an exception occurs during execution---an infrequent event.
 
  
Yale