Accurate Indirect Branch Prediction

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Accurate Indirect Branch Prediction (1998)

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by Karel Driesen , Urs Hölzle

Venue:	IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE 25TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
Citations:	60 - 0 self

BibTeX

@INPROCEEDINGS{Driesen98accurateindirect,
    author = {Karel Driesen and Urs Hölzle},
    title = {Accurate Indirect Branch Prediction},
    booktitle = {IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE 25TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE},
    year = {1998},
    pages = {167--178},
    publisher = {}
}

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Abstract

Indirect branch prediction is likely to become increasingly important in the future because indirect branches occur more frequently in object-oriented programs. With misprediction rates of around 25% on current processors, indirect branches can incur a significant fraction of branch misprediction overhead even though they remain less frequent than the more predictable conditional branches. We investigate a wide range of two-level predictors dedicated exclusively to indirect branches. Starting with predictors that use full-precision addresses and unlimited tables, we progressively introduce hardware constraints and minimize the loss of predictor performance at each step. For programs from the SPECint95 suite as well as a suite of large C++ applications, a two-level predictor achieves a misprediction rate of 9.8% with a 1K-entry table and 7.3% with an 8K-entry table, representing more than a threefold improvement over an ideal BTB. A hybrid predictor further reduces the misprediction rates to 8.98% and 5.95%, respectively.

Keyphrases

misprediction rate accurate indirect branch prediction indirect branch two-level predictor threefold improvement hardware constraint 1k-entry table predictor performance wide range large application unlimited table full-precision address predictable conditional branch specint95 suite branch misprediction object-oriented program 8k-entry table indirect branch prediction ideal btb significant fraction hybrid predictor current processor

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