Term · Compute & AI Hardware
Speculative execution
Running instructions whose necessity is not yet proven, typically past an unresolved branch, and discarding the results if the guess was wrong. It is essential to performance but leaves microarchitectural side effects.
- Also known as
- Speculation
- Type
- Term
- Domain
- Compute & AI Hardware, CPU architecture
- Also relevant to
- Design & Architecture
Notes
Spectre and Meltdown in 2018 showed those side effects could leak data across privilege boundaries, forcing costly mitigations.
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Part of the Compute & AI Hardware glossary, with every term in the topic and the lifecycles, tools and standards that use them.
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