Diverge-Merge Processor: Generalized and Energy-Efficient Dynamic Predication
Hyesoon Kim, José A. Joao, Onur Mutlu, Yale N. Patt · IEEE Micro · 2007
The branch misprediction penalty is a major performance limiter and a major cause of wasted energy in high-performance processors. The diverge-merge processor reduces this penalty by dynamically predicating a wide range of hard-to-predict branches at runtime in an energy-efficient way that doesn't significantly increase hardware complexity or require major ISA changes