LOOK-AHEAD WAKE-AND-GO ENGINE WITH SPECULATIVE EXECUTION

A wake-and-go mechanism is provided for a microprocessor. The wake-and-go mechanism looks ahead in the instruction stream of a thread for programming idioms that indicate that the thread is waiting for an event. if a look-ahead polling operation succeeds, the look-ahead wake-and-go engine may record an instruction address for the corresponding idiom so that the wake-and-go mechanism may have the thread perform speculative execution at a time when the thread is waiting for an event. During execution, when the wake-and-go mechanism recognizes a programming idiom, the wake-and-go mechanism may store the thread state in the thread state storage. Instead of putting the thread to sleep, the wake-and-go mechanism may perform speculative execution.