Hardware support for hiding cache latency
Michael Golden, Trevor Mudge · 1993
As the decrease in processor cycle time continues to outpace the decrease in memory cycle time, even moderately sized on-chip caches may require several cycles of access time in the near future. This means that time is lost, even on a cache hit, if independent instructions cannot be scheduled after a read from memory. A novel hardware device is proposed that keeps track of the history of load instructions and predicts their targets before they are computed by the instruction pipeline. This allows the saving of several processor cycles. The storage required to implement such a device is quite large, but as the latency required to read from the first level cache grows, a moderate performance improvement is seen. Hardware Support for Hiding Cache Latency January 13, 1995 2 1.0 Introduction As processor speeds increase to higher and higher levels, the need for a fast memory system becomes more pronounced. In the past, a small, fast first-level cache was adequate to match the memory spe...