EFFICIENT STORE QUEUE ARCHITECTURE

One embodiment of the present invention provides a store queue that applies the stores to a memory subsystem in program order. This store queue includes a content-addressable memory (CAM), which holds pending stores and facilitates looking up stores based on addresses for the stores, wherein the CAM does not keep track of program order between stores to different addresses. The store queue also includes a program-order queue which keeps track of program order between the stores in the CAM and thereby facilitates applying the stores to the memory subsystem in program order. In a variation on this embodiment, the CAM is a priority CAM which holds separate copies of multiple stores with identical addresses, and when a lookup based on an address matches multiple stores, returns the youngest matching store.