Preferred embodiment of a hardware -assisted garbage-collection system

Hardware-assisted garbage collection combines the potential of high average-case allocation rates and memory bandwidth with fast worst-case allocation, fetch, and store times. This paper describes an architecture that allows memory fetch and store opera-tions to execute, on the average, nearly as fast as traditional memory. It describes a fea-sible implementation of a garbage-collected memory module, but does not provide a thorough discussion of possible design alternatives, nor does it provide rigorous justifi-cation for choices between available design alternatives