EARLY EXIT TRANSFORMATIONS FOR SOFTWARE PIPELINING

The invention is directed to the transformation of software loops having early exit conditions, thereby allowing the loops to be more effectively converted to a single basic block for software pipelining. The invention assigns a predicate register for each early exit condition of the software loop. The predicate registers are set when the corresponding early exit condition is satisfied. In this manner, when the loop terminates the predicate registers can be examined to indicate which early exit conditions were satisfied. The invention produces loops having a lower recurrence II and resource II than conventional techniques.