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AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsMichael N. Day, Charles R. Johns, John S. Liberty, Todd E. Swanson, Thuong Q. Truong
Estimating the term…
A mechanism for communicating instructions and data between a processor and external devices are provided. The mechanism makes use of a channel interface as the primary mechanism for communicating between the processor and a memory flow controller. The channel interface provides channels for communicating with processor facilities, memory flow control facilities, machine state registers, and external processor interrupt facilities, for example. These channels may be designated as blocking or non-blocking. With blocking channels, when no data is available to be read from the corresponding registers, or there is no space available to write to the corresponding registers, the processor is placed in a low power “stall” state. The processor is automatically awakened, via communication across the blocking channel, when data becomes available or space is freed. Thus, the channels of the present invention permit the processor to stay in a low power state.
A method, in a data processing system, for communicating instructions and data between a processor and a memory flow control (MFC) unit, comprising:
A computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having a computer readable program, wherein the computer readable program, when executed on a computing device, causes the computing device to:
An apparatus, comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.