Strategies for optimal operating point selection in timing speculative processors
Omid Assare, Rajesh K. Gupta · 2016
Performance of timing speculative processors relies on strategies for accurate prediction of optimal operating points. In this paper, we develop an efficient process-variation-aware simulation framework and use it to evaluate a range of such timing speculation strategies. Our experiments on a timing speculative processor running applications from the MiBench benchmark suite show that, in a typical case, while a perfect timing speculation strategy can improve throughput by up to 143% over a guardbanded design, the most commonly used approach in the literature achieves only a 21.8% of the potential gains. By improving the speculation accuracy, the new strategies we propose in this paper can realize up to 35.6% of the potential gains, a throughput improvement of 50.9% over a guardbanded design.