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Thanks, the existence of scratchpad (which makes the IO analogy even closer) adequately explains the lack of a non-stalling load.

Compilers which care (which would seem to be those targeting embedded; not anything gp) can then, instead of providing the two differing static schedules mentioned elsewhere in this thread, provide two different code paths: one to kick off scratchpad DMA if necessary (and possibly do something useful in the meantime?), and one that knows all its data is already in scratchpad, so it can statically unroll to an appropriate width.