18. The method of claim 11 , wherein said using byte masks to detect the load-store collision comprises: indicating a load-store collision if the byte masks indicate a byte overlap within the same word of the cache line in which the data specified by the load operation and the data specified by the store operation begin; and otherwise indicating no load-store collision.
11. A method performed by a hardware apparatus for detecting a load-store collision within a microprocessor between a load operation and an older store operation each of which accesses data in the same cache line, the method comprising: determining whether the data specified by the load operation and the data specified by the store operation begin in the same word of the cache line, wherein a word comprises a plurality of bytes; using byte masks to detect the load-store collision, if the data specified by the load operation and the data specified by the store operation begin in the same word of the cache line; and using word masks to detect the load-store collision, if the data specified by the load operation and the data specified by the store operation do not begin in the same word of the cache line.