Effective Branch Prediction through Caching of Aliasing Branches.pdfVIP

JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING 20, 557-574 (2004) 557 Effective Branch Prediction through Caching of Aliasing Branches* WEI-MING LIN AND AN-YI YANG+ Department of Electrical Engineering The University of Texas at San Antonio San Antonio, TX 78249, U.S.A. E-mail: wlin@ +Faraday Technology Corporation Hsinchu, 300 Taiwan E-mail: kevin_y@ High performance CPUs constantly face obstacles in pipelining delays from condi- tional branches to reach their expected potential. Precise branch prediction is required to overcome this performance limitation imposed on high performance architecture and is the key to many techniques for enhancing and exploiting Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP). In general, prediction accuracy can be improved by reducing aliases in the predic- tion table used in a traditional dynamic prediction mechanism. In this paper, we propose a new technique to significantly reduce the more likely destructive aliases by caching up recurring aliasing branches that occur within a small temporal locality with one another. An extensive pre-simulation analysis on traces clearly supports such a claim showing that aliasing branches with a small temporal locality account for majority of all aliases. This paper further shows that such aliases are more likely to lead to destructive predic- tion result. Thus, our technique, incorporated with a small additional “alias table” with its size much smaller than the existing prediction table normally used, is capable of eliminating most of aliases, especially the highly performance-degrading repetitive “lo- cal” aliases. Our simulation results demonstrate a significant improvement in prediction accuracy from adopting this technique while requiring very limited extra hardware cost. In addition, this proposed add-on feature can be easily incorporated into any existing or advanced dynamic branch predictors to further enhance their prediction performance. Keywords: branch prediction