US Patent Issued to SiFive on Feb. 17 for "Dependency tracking and chaining for vector instructions" (Texas, Massachusetts Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,554,504, issued on Feb. 17, was assigned to SiFive Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"Dependency tracking and chaining for vector instructions" was invented by Bradley Gene Burgess (Sunset Valley, Texas) and David Kravitz (Cambridge, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Apparatus and methods for dependency tracking, chaining, and/or fusing for vector instructions. A system, processor, or integrated circuit includes a renamer to generate a valid bit mask for each micro-operation decoded from a first vector instruction, where the valid bit mask indicates what portion of a mask register to write and generate a dependency bit mask for each micro-o...