A Hardware Cache Prefetching Scheme for Multimedia Data with Intermittently Irregular Strides
Young-Suk Chon, Hyun-Ju Moon, Joong-Nam Jeon, Sukil Kim · Jeongbo gwahaghoe nonmunji. si'seu'tem mich i'lon · 2004
Multimedia applications are required to process the huge amount of data at high speed in real time. The memory reference instructions such as loads and stores are the main factor which limits the high speed execution of processor. To enhance the memory reference speed, cache prefetch schemes are used so as to reduce the cache miss ratio and the total execution time by previously fetching data into cache that is expected to be referenced in the future. In this study, we present an advanced data cache prefetching scheme that improves the conventional RPT (reference prediction table) based scheme. We considers the cache line size in calculation of the address stride referenced by the same instruction, and enhances the prefetching algorithm so that the effect of prefetching could be maintained even if an irregular address stride is inserted into the series of uniform strides. According to experiment results on multimedia benchmark programs, the cache miss ratio has been improved 29% in average compared to the conventional RPT scheme while the bus usage has increased relatively small amount (0.03%).