Thread-Based Data Prefetching
Zhang Min-xuan · Computer Engineering and Science · 2008
Most applications,especially desktop applications,are single-threaded.For lack of threaded applications,most multi-threaded/multi-core microprocessors can not unlock their full power.Many researches have been proposed to speed up single-threaded applications on modern multi-threaded microprocessors.Most of them focus on the efficiency of memory access and the accuracy of branch prediction.Thread-based data prefetching executes in spare contexts and actual codes decoupled from the main program,allowing much more flexibility than traditional data prefetching techniques.In this paper,we investigate the access patterns of modern applications and the effect of control flow;design and evaluate a new data prefetching method using helper threads:TDP.For a set of benchmarks,an average speedup of 7% is achieved.