chicken bit

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   A bit on a chip that can be used to disable one of the features of the chip if it proves…

   A bit on a chip that can be used to disable one of the features of the chip if it proves faulty or negatively impacts performance.

   • As an example, modules such as branch predictors and speculative execution units can be turned off with a variant of the “chicken bits”, control bits common to many design developments to control the activation of specific features.
   • Validation of a chicken bit can be challenging, because disabling a feature is often as intrusive in the code as the feature itself.
   • As a matter of fact, most of these chicken bits will never be documented, and a small portion of the chicken bits will be documented only when they are needed to work around a chip problem.

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