Abstract: Aspects of the present disclosure relate to an apparatus comprising fetch circuitry. The fetch circuitry comprises a pointer-based fetch queue for queuing processing instructions retrieved from a storage, and pointer storage for storing a pointer identifying a current fetch queue element. The apparatus comprises decode circuitry having a plurality of decode units, and fetch queue extraction circuitry to, based on the pointer, extract the content of a plurality of elements of the fetch queue; apply combinatorial logic to speculatively produce, from the content of said fetch queue entries, a plurality of speculative potential instructions; and transmit each speculative potential instruction to a corresponding one of said decode units. Each decode unit is configured to decode the corresponding speculative potential instruction.

Abstract: Aspects of the present disclosure relate to an apparatus comprising fetch circuitry. The fetch circuitry comprises a pointer-based fetch queue for queuing processing instructions retrieved from a storage, and pointer storage for storing a pointer identifying a current fetch queue element. The apparatus comprises decode circuitry having a plurality of decode units, and fetch queue extraction circuitry to, based on the pointer, extract the content of a plurality of elements of the fetch queue; apply combinatorial logic to speculatively produce, from the content of said fetch queue entries, a plurality of speculative potential instructions; and transmit each speculative potential instruction to a corresponding one of said decode units. Each decode unit is configured to decode the corresponding speculative potential instruction.