The Effect of Speculatively Updating Branch History on Branch Prediction Accuracy, Revisited (1994)
| Venue: | In Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Microarchitecture |
| Citations: | 31 - 2 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Hao94theeffect,
author = {Eric Hao and Po-yung Chang and Yale N. Patt},
title = {The Effect of Speculatively Updating Branch History on Branch Prediction Accuracy, Revisited},
booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Microarchitecture},
year = {1994},
pages = {228--232}
}
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Abstract
Recent research [6] has suggested that the branch history register need not contain the outcomes of the most recent branches in order for the Two-Level Adaptive Branch Predictor to work well. From this result, it is tempting to conclude that the branch history register need not be speculatively updated. This paper revisits this work and explains when the most recent branch outcomes can be omitted without significantly affecting performance. It also explains why this result does not imply that speculative update is not important. This paper shows that because the number of unresolved branches present in the machine varies during program execution, branch predictors without speculative update perform significantly worse than branch predictors with speculative update. Keywords: Two-Level Adaptive Branch Prediction, dynamic branch prediction, speculative execution, superscalar processors, out-of-order execution 1 Introduction Very accurate branch prediction is a critical requirement for...
Citations
| 264 | Y.N.Patt. Alternative Implementations of Two-level Adaptive Branch Prediction - Yeh - 1992 |
| 232 | Branch prediction strategies and branch target buffer design - Lee, Smith - 1984 |
| 175 | Improving the accuracy of dynamic branch prediction using branch correlation - Pan, So, et al. - 1992 |
| 142 | Two-level adaptive branch prediction - Yeh, Patt - 1991 |
| 121 | Reducing the cost of branches - McFarling, Hennessy - 1986 |
| 77 | Checkpoint repair for out-of-order execution machines - Hwu, Patt - 1987 |
| 63 | A comprehensive instruction fetch mechanism for a processor supporting speculative execution - Yeh, Patt - 1992 |
| 8 | The Impact of Unresolved Branches on Branch Prediction Scheme Performance - Talcott, Yamamoto, et al. - 1994 |
