Glossary
ARM DDI 0301H
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NaN
Not a number. A symbolic entity encoded in a floating-point format that has the maximum
exponent field and a nonzero fraction. An SNaN causes an invalid operand exception if used as
an operand and a most significant fraction bit of zero. A QNaN propagates through almost every
arithmetic operation without signaling exceptions and has a most significant fraction bit of one.
PA
See
Physical Address.
Penalty
The number of cycles in which no useful Execute stage pipeline activity can occur because an
instruction flow is different from that assumed or predicted.
Potentially exceptional instruction
An instruction that is determined, based on the exponents of the operands and the sign bits, to
have the potential to produce an overflow, underflow, or invalid condition. After this
determination is made, the instruction that has the potential to cause an exception causes the
VFP11 coprocessor to enter the exceptional state and bounce the next trigger instruction issued.
See also
Bounce, Trigger instruction, and Exceptional state.
Power-on reset
See
Cold reset.
Prefetching
In pipelined processors, the process of fetching instructions from memory to fill up the pipeline
before the preceding instructions have finished executing. Prefetching an instruction does not
mean that the instruction has to be executed.
Prefetch Abort
An indication from a memory system to a core that it must halt execution of an attempted illegal
memory access. A Prefetch Abort can be caused by the external or internal memory system as
a result of attempting to access invalid instruction memory.
See also
Data Abort, External Abort and Abort.
Processor
A processor is the circuitry in a computer system required to process data using the computer
instructions. It is an abbreviation of microprocessor. A clock source, power supplies, and main
memory are also required to create a minimum complete working computer system.
Programming Language Interface (PLI)
For Verilog simulators, an interface by which so-called foreign code (code written in a different
language) can be included in a simulation.
Physical Address (PA)
The MMU performs a translation on
Modified Virtual Addresses
(MVA) to produce the
Physical
Address
(PA) which is given to AHB to perform an external access. The PA is also stored in the
data cache to avoid the necessity for address translation when data is cast out of the cache.
See also
Fast Context Switch Extension.
Read
Reads are defined as memory operations that have the semantics of a load. That is, the ARM
instructions LDM, LDRD, LDC, LDR, LDRT, LDRSH, LDRH, LDRSB, LDRB, LDRBT,
LDREX, RFE, STREX, SWP, and SWPB, and the Thumb instructions LDM, LDR, LDRSH,
LDRH, LDRSB, LDRB, and POP. Java instructions that are accelerated by hardware can cause
a number of reads to occur, according to the state of the Java stack and the implementation of
the Java hardware acceleration.
RealView ICE
A system for debugging embedded processor cores using a JTAG interface.
Region
A partition of instruction or data memory space.
Remapping
Changing the address of physical memory or devices after the application has started executing.
This is typically done to enable RAM to replace ROM when the initialization has been
completed.