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A Decoupled Predictor-Directed Stream Prefetching Architecture
An effective method for reducing the effect of load latency in
modern processors is data prefetching. One form of hardware-based data
prefetching, stream buffers, has been shown to be particularly effective due to
its' ability to detect data streams and run ahead of them, prefetching as it
goes. Unfortunately, in the past, the applicability of streaming was limited
to stride intensive code. In this paper we propose Predictor-Directed Stream
Buffers (PSB), which allows the stream buffer to follow a general address
prediction stream instead of a fixed stride. A general address prediction
stream complicates the allocation of both stream buffer and memory resources,
because the predictions generated will not be as reliable as prior sequential
next-line and stride-based stream buffer implementations. To address this, we
examine using confidence-based techniques to guide the allocation and
prioritization of stream buffers and their prefetch requests. Our results show
that when using PSB on a benchmark suite heavy in pointer-based applications,
PSB provides a 23% speedup on average over the best previous stream buffer
implementation, and an improvement of 75% over using no prefetching at all.Pre-2018 CSE ID: CS2001-069