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International Symposium on High Performance Computing

ISHPC 1997: High Performance Computing pp 51–70Cite as

Instruction cache prefetching using multilevel branch prediction

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1336))

Abstract

This paper presents an instruction cache prefetching mechanism capable of prefetching past branches in multiple-issue processors. Such processors at high clock rates often use small instruction caches which have significant miss rates. Prefetching from secondary cache can hide the instruction cache miss penalties but only if initiated sufficiently far ahead of the current program counter. Existing instruction cache prefetching methods are strictly sequential and cannot do that due to their inability to prefetch past branches. By keeping branch history and branch target addresses we predict a future PC several branches past the current branch. We describe a possible prefetching architecture and evaluate its accuracy, the impact of the instruction prefetching on performance, and its interaction with sequential prefetching. For a 4-issue processor and a cache architecture patterned after the DEC Alpha-21164 we show that our prefetching unit can be more effective than sequential prefetching. The two types of prefetching eliminate different types of misses and thus can be effectively combined to achieve better performance.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA

    Alexander V. Veidenbaum

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  1. Alexander V. Veidenbaum
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Editor information

Constantine Polychronopoulos Kazuki Joe Keijiro Araki Makoto Amamiya

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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Veidenbaum, A.V. (1997). Instruction cache prefetching using multilevel branch prediction. In: Polychronopoulos, C., Joe, K., Araki, K., Amamiya, M. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISHPC 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1336. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0024203

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0024203

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-63766-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69644-5

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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