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Hi all,

As the title suggests, I am interested in the clarification of an instruction stream and an instruction queue. I searched on the Intel manuals for a definition, but I couldn't find any. Also, does anyone know any specific information about these two for Intel Atom processors?

Thanks.

The instruction stream is the control flow (note that this control flow might actually be a combination of several, logically distinct, control flows since you may be multiplexing multiple threads of execution, servicing interrupts, and so forth). Instruction queues are microarchitectural optimizations that prefetch instructions so that they become available by the time they need to be decoded. Two exampels are prefetch queues and pipelines.

It still seems rather complicated but thanks anyway. Also, I guess an instruction pool is the same as an instruction queue?

Thanks.