Registers for data transfers

This application is a continuation application and claims priority to U.S. application Ser. No. 10/116,670, filed on Apr. 3, 2002 (issuing as U.S. Pat. No. 7,437,724), the content of which is incorporated herein in its entirety.

Parallel processing is an efficient form of information processing of concurrent events in a computing process. Parallel processing demands concurrent execution of many programs, in contrast to sequential processing. In the context of parallel processing, parallelism involves doing more than one thing at the same time. Unlike a serial paradigm where all tasks are performed sequentially at a single station or a pipelined machine where tasks are performed at specialized stations, with parallel processing, many stations are provided, each capable of performing and carrying out various tasks and functions simultaneously. A number of stations work simultaneously and independently on the same or common elements of a computing task. Accordingly, parallel processing solves various types of computing tasks and certain problems are suitable for solution by applying several instruction processing units and several data streams.

Referring to FIG. 1, a computer processing system 10 includes a parallel, hardware-based multithreaded network processor 12. The hardware-based multithreaded processor 12 is coupled to a memory system or memory resource 14. Memory system 14 includes dynamic random access memory (DPAM) 14a and static random access memory 14b (SRAM) . The processing system 10 is especially useful for tasks that can be broken into parallel subtasks or functions. Specifically, the hardware-based multithreaded processor 12 is useful for tasks that are bandwidth oriented rather than latency oriented. The hardware-based multithreaded processor 12 has multiple functional microengines or programming engines 16a-16h (collectively, programming engines 16) each with multiple hardware controlled threads that are simultaneously active and independently work on a specific task.