Hazard (computer architecture)

In the domain of central processing unit (CPU) design, hazards are problems with the instruction pipeline in CPU microarchitectures when the next instruction cannot execute in the following clock cycle, and can potentially lead to incorrect computation results. Three common types of hazards are data hazards, structural hazards, and control flow hazards (branching hazards).

There are several methods used to deal with hazards, including pipeline stalls/pipeline bubbling, operand forwarding, and in the case of out-of-order execution, the scoreboarding method and the Tomasulo algorithm.

Instructions in a pipelined processor are performed in several stages, so that at any given time several instructions are being processed in the various stages of the pipeline, such as fetch and execute. There are many different instruction pipeline microarchitectures, and instructions may be executed out-of-order. A hazard occurs when two or more of these simultaneous (possibly out of order) instructions conflict.

Data hazards occur when instructions that exhibit data dependence modify data in different stages of a pipeline. Ignoring potential data hazards can result in race conditions (also termed race hazards). There are three situations in which a data hazard can occur:

Consider two instructions i1 and i2, with i1 occurring before i2 in program order.

(i2 tries to read a source before i1 writes to it) A read after write (RAW) data hazard refers to a situation where an instruction refers to a result that has not yet been calculated or retrieved. This can occur because even though an instruction is executed after a prior instruction, the prior instruction has been processed only partly through the pipeline.

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