INSTRUCTION CACHE SYSTEM FOR IMPLEMENTING PROGRAMS HAVING NON- SEQUENTIAL INSTRUCTIONS AND METHOD OF IMPLEMENTING SAME

A system for increasing the speed and efficiency of instruction execution by a computer processing system. An instruction cache is provided to receive a minor number of stored instructions for execution by the computer processing system. The instructions are prefetched and returned in cache based upon an analysis of instructions which are in the cache pending execution. Target instructions of branch instructions may be prefetched as a result of the analysis of a branch instruction pending in the cache. Other instructions may be retained in cache when they are tagged as being likely to be reused.