Execution history guided instruction prefetching

Abstract

The increasing gap in performance between processors and main memory has made effective instructions prefetching techniques more important than ever. A major deficiency of existing prefetching methods is that most of them require an extra port to I-cache. A recent study by [19] shows that this factor alone explains why most modern microprocessors do not use such I-cache hardware-based I-cache prefetch schemes. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First we present a method that does not require an extra port to I-cache