Abstract
Predicting indirect-branch targets has become a performance bottleneck for many applications. Previous high-performance indirect-branch predictors usually require significant hardware storage or additional compiler support, which increases the complexity of the processor front-end or the compilers. This paper proposes a complexity-effective indirect-branch prediction mechanism, called the Set-Way Index Pointing (SWIP) prediction. It stores multiple indirect-branch targets in different branch target buffer (BTB) entries, whose set indices and way locations are treated as set-way index pointers. These pointers are stored in the existing branch-direction predictor. SWIP prediction reuses the branch direction predictor to provide such pointers, and then accesses the pointed BTB entries for the predicted indirect-branch target. Our evaluation shows that SWIP prediction could achieve attractive performance improvement without requiring large dedicated storage or additional compiler support. It improves the indirect-branch prediction accuracy by 36.5% compared to that of a commonly-used BTB, resulting in average performance improvement of 18.56%. Its energy consumption is also reduced by 14.34% over that of the baseline.
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This work is supported by the “HGJ” National Science and Technology Major Project of China under Grant No. 2009ZX01029-001-002.
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Xie, ZC., Tong, D., Huang, MK. et al. SWIP Prediction: Complexity-Effective Indirect-Branch Prediction Using Pointers. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 27, 754–768 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-012-1262-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-012-1262-8