A knitting machine having needles which are mounted to be longitudinally moveable and having needle cams with a needle control curve for moving the needles, the needle control curves, at least in the latch closure region, having a withdrawal angle \u226635\xb0. The pre-load pad 70 restricts displacement in relation to the widthwise direction, by one side face portion of a holder 61 fixed to a gear housing 22. A sensor fusion module 108 may be included to produce a unified estimate of the user’s angular rotation rate and current orientation to be provided to an orientation and rate estimate module 120. If an entry is found in the table, a load address prediction is made for the load instruction and conveyed to the data cache. Additionally, bandwidth monitoring can be performed in between each subsegment download, and if bandwidth has fallen substantially, and the segment download is not near completion, then the already-downloaded subsegments can be discarded, and the segment download can be restarted from a lower-quality variant. Certain tools disclosed herein minimize these latencies via pipelining of processing blocks.