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A slipstream processor accelerates a program by speculatively removing repeatedly ineffectual instructions. Detecting the roots of ineffectual computation: unreferenced writes, nonmodifying writes, and correctly predicted branches, is straightforward. On the other hand, detecting ineffectual instructions in the backward slices of these root instructions currently requires complex back-propagation circuitry. We observe that, by logically monitoring the speculative program (instead of the original program), back-propagation can be reduced to detecting unreferenced writes. That is, once root instructions are actually removed, instructions at the next higher level in the backward slice become newly exposed unreferenced writes in the speculative program. This new algorithm, called implicit back-propagation, eliminates complex hardware and achieves an average performance improvement of 11.8 percent, only marginally …