Abstract: The emulator includes first and second pipelined stages connected through a bidirectional bus for executing source instructions normally executed by a different/source computer in a highly overlapped manner. The first stage includes an emulator chip which performs the function of fetching and decoding each source instruction stored in cache memory resulting in the generation of a number of vector addresses required for executing the instruction by the second stage. The second stage includes a high performance microprocessor chip having on-chip instruction and data caches for storing a plurality of emulation subroutines and data fetched during subroutine execution. In pipelined fashion, the emulator chip fetches and decodes each source instruction which generates a vector branch address which is loaded into the branch vector register while the microprocessor chip fetches and executes emulation subroutines specified by the vector address transferred via the bus for each previously decoded source instruction.

Abstract: A multiprocessor data processing system includes a processing unit which, together with other processing units, including input/output units, connects in common to an asynchronous bus network for sharing a main memory. At least one processing unit includes a synchronous private write through cache memory system which includes a main directory and data store in addition to a bus watcher and a duplicate directory. The bus watcher connects to the asynchronous bus network and captures all main memory requests while the duplicate directory maintains a copy of the cache unit's main directory. Independently and autonomously synchronously operated tie-breaker circuits apply requests to the main and duplicate directories. When tie-breaker circuits detect conditions relating to a request which could result in cache incoherency, it initiates uninterrupted sequences of cycles within the corresponding cache main or duplicate directory to complete the processing of that same request.