Meaning of chicken bit | Babel Free

Definitions

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.

Examples

“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.”

CEFR level