Abstract
To design a good two-level predictor, we found that a low interference among branches and an even utilization of the entries in the pattern table are two key factors. In order to arrive at a balanced design and achieve the above two goals simultaneously, we first introduce the concept of branch pattern locality. Then, a new predictor design, called the Global PAttern Locality predictor (G-PAL), is introduced. The predictor is developed based on pattern locality and employs a cachelike pattern table to keep only those patterns that are referenced most frequently and recently. In this way, not only the interference among branches can be reduced, but the entries in the pattern table can be fully utilized.
This work was supported in part by the National Science Council under grants NSC-85-2221-E-007-031 and NSC-85-2213-E-007-049.
Chapter PDF
References
Mcfarling, S.: Combining Branch Predictors. WRL Technical Note TN-36. Digital Equipment Corp. (1993)
McFarling, S., Hennessy, J.: Reducing the cost of branches. Proc. of the 13th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. (1986)
Smith, J.: A Study of Branch Prediction Strategies. Proc. of the 8th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. (1981)
Srivastava, A., Eustace, A.: ATOM: A System for Building Customized Program Analysis Tools. Proc. of the SIGPLAN'94 Conference on Programming Languages Design and Implementation. (1994)
Yeh T., Patt Y.: A Comparison of Dynamic Branch Predictors that use Two Levels of Branch History. Proc. of the 20th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. (1993)
Young, C., Gloy, N., Smith, M.: A Comparative Analysis of Schemes for Correlated Branch Prediction. Proc. of the 22th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chen, CM., King, CT. (1996). Designing dynamic two-level branch predictors based on pattern locality. In: Bougé, L., Fraigniaud, P., Mignotte, A., Robert, Y. (eds) Euro-Par'96 Parallel Processing. Euro-Par 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1124. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0024774
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0024774
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61627-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70636-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive