System and method for simulating hardware interrupts

A system and method is provided to simulate hardware interrupts by inserting instructions into a stream of instructions where a "no operation" (or NOOP) instruction would normally be inserted. The instruction is inserted is a conditional branch instruction, called a BISLED, that branches if there is external data in a known memory area. In one embodiment, the processor has at least two pipelines that need to be aligned so that certain instructions are scheduled for the first pipeline and other instructions are scheduled for the other. In this embodiment, the BISLED also serves the purpose of re-aligning the instruction stream so that instructions are placed in the correct pipeline based upon the function performed by the instruction.