EMBEDDED Intel486™ PROCESSOR HARDWARE REFERENCE MANUAL
3-6
The Intel486 processor has four modes of operation: Real Address Mode (Real Mode), Protected
Mode, Virtual Mode (within Protected Mode), and System Management Mode (SMM). In Real
Mode the Intel486 processor operates as a very fast 8086. Real Mode is required primarily to set
up the Intel486 processor for Protected Mode operation.
Protected Mode provides access to the sophisticated memory management paging and privilege
capabilities of the processor. Within Protected Mode, software can perform a task switch to enter
into tasks designated as Virtual 8086 Mode tasks. Each Virtual 8086 task behaves with 8086 se-
mantics, allowing 8086 processor software (an application program or an entire operating sys-
tem) to execute.
System Management Mode (SMM) provides system designers with a means of adding new soft-
ware-controlled features to their computer products that always operate transparently to the op-
erating system (OS) and software applications. SMM is intended for use only by system
firmware, not by applications software or general purpose systems software.
The Intel486 processor also has features that facilitate high-performance hardware designs. The
1X bus clock input eases high-frequency board-level designs. The clock multiplier on IntelDX2
and IntelDX4 processors improves execution performance without increasing board design com-
plexity. The clock multiplier enhances all operations operating out of the cache that are not
blocked by external bus accesses. The burst bus feature enables fast cache fills.
3.1
INSTRUCTION PIPELINING
Not every instruction involves all internal units. When an instruction needs the participation of
several units, each unit operates in parallel with others on instructions at different stages of exe-
cution. Although each instruction is processed sequentially, several instructions are at varying
stages of execution in the processor at any given time. This is called instruction pipelining. In-
struction prefetch, instruction decode, microcode execution, integer operations, floating-point
operations, segmentation, paging, cache management, and bus interface operations are all per-
formed simultaneously.
Figure 3-4
shows some of this parallelism for a single instruction: the in-
struction fetch, two-stage decode, execution, and register write-back of the execution result. Each
stage in this pipeline can occur in one clock cycle.
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