Data Prefetching by Exploiting Global and Local Access Patterns
Ahmad Sharif, Hsien-Hsin S. Lee · 2011
This paper proposes a new hardware prefetcher that extends the idea of the Global History Buffer (GHB) originally proposed in [1]. We augment the GHB with several Local History Buffers (LHBs), which keep the memory access information for selective program counters. These buffers can then be queried on cache accesses to predict future memory accesses and enable data prefetching using novel detection schemes. Our trace-driven simulations show that by using approximately a 4KByte (32 Kbits) storage budget, we can obtain an average performance improvement of 22 % for SPEC2006 benchmark suite on an ideal out-of-order processor. 1.