Storage Efficient Hardware Prefetching using Delta-Correlating Prediction Tables.
Marius Grannæs, Magnus Jahre, Lasse Natvig · The journal of instruction-level parallelism · 2011
This paper presents a novel prefetching heuristic called Delta Correlating Prediction Tables (DCPT). DCPT builds upon two previously proposed techniques, RPT prefetching by Chen and Baer and PC/DC prefetching by Nesbit and Smith. It combines the storageecient table based design of Reference Prediction Tables (RPT) with the high performance delta correlating design of PC/DC. DCPT substantially reduces the complexity of PC/DC prefetching by avoiding expensive pointer chasing in the GHB (Global History Buer) and recomputation of the delta buer. We evaluate this prefetcher on a simulated processor using CMP$im and the SPEC2006 benchmarks. We show that DCPT prefetching can increase performance by up to 3.7X for single benchmarks, while the geometric mean of speedups across all SPEC2006 benchmarks is 42% compared to no prefetching.