Patent US 6,795,845

A method of performing a thread switching operation within a multithreaded processor includes detecting dispatch of a first predetermined quantity of instruction information of a first thread, from an instruction streaming buffer to an instruction pre-decoder within the multithreaded processor. A branch instruction within the instruction information of the first thread to be dispatched from the instruction information source is also detected. Responsive to the detection of the branch instruction and the detection of the dispatch of the first predetermined quantity of instruction information of the first thread, a thread switching operation is performed with respect to the output of the instruction streaming buffer. The dispatch of instruction information of a second thread from the instruction streaming buffer is thus commenced.