US 11,720,511 B2
Selecting, from a pool of items, a selected item to be associated with a given request
Arthur Brian Laughton, Hathersage (GB)
Assigned to Arm Limited, Cambridge (GB)
Filed by Arm Limited, Cambridge (GB)
Filed on Jun. 2, 2021, as Appl. No. 17/336,570.
Prior Publication US 2022/0391342 A1, Dec. 8, 2022
Int. Cl. G06F 13/40 (2006.01); G06F 16/22 (2019.01)
CPC G06F 13/4027 (2013.01) [G06F 16/2246 (2019.01)] 17 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. An apparatus comprising:
interface circuitry to receive requests; and
selection circuitry responsive to the interface circuitry receiving a given request to select, from a pool of items, at least one selected item to be associated with the given request;
wherein the selection circuitry comprises a plurality of nodes, each configured to select m output signals from n input signals provided to that node, wherein n>m;
wherein the plurality of nodes are arranged in a tree structure comprising a plurality of layers including at least a first layer of nodes and a final layer comprising a final node, the first layer of nodes being configured to receive input signals indicative of items in the pool of items, and the final node being configured to output a signal indicative of the at least one selected item, the output signals from a given layer of nodes other than the final node being supplied as the input signals for a subsequent layer; and
wherein the apparatus comprises control circuitry configured to output, in dependence on a type of the given request, a suppression signal, and the tree structure comprises a gate node configured to suppress, in response to the suppression signal having a first value, selection from input signals received from a given portion of the tree structure to prevent a subset of the pool of items from being selected for at least one type of request,
wherein:
each node in the tree structure has the same values of n and m, wherein m=1;
the pool of items comprises p items and the subset of the pool of items comprises s items;
the gate node is positioned in a given layer which is y layers before the final layer, where when y=0 the given layer is the final layer itself and when y>0 the given layer is an earlier layer than the final layer;
the gate node is responsive to the suppression signal having the first value to prevent x of its input signals from being selected, wherein x<n; and
the position of the given layer is defined by x/n(y+1)=s/p.