Patent attributes
One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for optimizing parallel thread execution in a temporal single-instruction multiple thread (SIMT) architecture. When the threads in a parallel thread group execute temporally on a common processing pipeline rather than spatially on parallel processing pipelines, execution cycles may be reduced when some threads in the parallel thread group are inactive due to divergence. Similarly, an instruction can be dispatched for execution by only one thread in the parallel thread group when the threads in the parallel thread group are executing a scalar instruction. Reducing the number of threads that execute an instruction removes unnecessary or redundant operations for execution by the processing pipelines. Information about scalar operands and operations and divergence of the threads is used in the instruction dispatch logic to eliminate unnecessary or redundant activity in the processing pipelines.