Posted on Let’s take a closer look at instruction fetch, decode and dispatch in the Cortex-A72 micro-architecture. These are the “front-end” stages of the core pipeline. The “back-end” of the pipeline consists of the register file(s), execution units and retirement (reorder) buffer. Branch prediction is frequently associated with the front-end since it directly affects instruction fetch. [Update: This post is part 1 of a two part series. Part 2 discusses ARM Cortex-A72 execution and load/store operations.] The front-end has one major job: Fetch ARMv8 instructions and keep the ba...