CROB: implementing a large instruction window through compression

  • Authors:
  • Fernando Latorre;Grigorios Magklis;Jose González;Pedro Chaparro;Antonio González

  • Affiliations:
  • Intel Barcelona Research Center, Intel Labs, UPC;Intel Barcelona Research Center, Intel Labs, UPC;Intel Barcelona Research Center, Intel Labs, UPC;Intel Barcelona Research Center, Intel Labs, UPC;Intel Barcelona Research Center, Intel Labs, UPC

  • Venue:
  • Transactions on high-performance embedded architectures and compilers III
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Current processors require a large number of in-flight instructions in order to look for further parallelism and hide the increasing gap between memory latency and processor cycle time. These in-flight instructions are typically stored in centralized structures called reorder buffer (ROB), which is a centerpiece to handle precise exceptions and recover a safe state in the event of a branch misprediction. However, this structure is becoming so big that it is difficult to fit it in the power budget of future processors designs. In this paper we propose a novel ROB microarchitecture named CROB (Compressed ROB) that can compress ROB entries and therefore give the illusion of having a larger virtual ROB than the number of ROB entries. The performance study of CROB shows a tremendous benefit, with an average speedup of 20% and 12% for a 128-entry and 256-entry ROB respectively. For some benchmark categories such as SpecFP2000, speedup raise up to 30%.