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cuiwei
  1. Does the term 'instruction stream' necessarily mean the instructions from another thread in the same process?
  2. If the answer to Q1 is yes, then if the core is running a single-thread process, then it has to wait when faced with the stall, right?
tcm

1: I'm not sure that I'm following your question. A thread is an instruction stream, so instruction stream refers to a given thread, not a different thread (a different thread is also an instruction stream, but not the same one).

2: If a multi-threaded processor has only been provided one software thread, then there is nothing else for it to switch to upon a cache miss. In order for the multi-threaded latency hiding technique to work, the programmer must supply additional threads (more than the number of cores) so that each core can switch between multiple threads upon cache misses.