Two-level adaptive training branch prediction
MICRO 24 Proceedings of the 24th annual international symposium on Microarchitecture
Alternative implementations of two-level adaptive branch prediction
ISCA '92 Proceedings of the 19th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Dynamic path-based branch correlation
Proceedings of the 28th annual international symposium on Microarchitecture
Correlation and aliasing in dynamic branch predictors
ISCA '96 Proceedings of the 23rd annual international symposium on Computer architecture
The agree predictor: a mechanism for reducing negative branch history interference
Proceedings of the 24th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Trading conflict and capacity aliasing in conditional branch predictors
Proceedings of the 24th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Path-based next trace prediction
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
An analysis of correlation and predictability: what makes two-level branch predictors work
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
The YAGS branch prediction scheme
MICRO 31 Proceedings of the 31st annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Variable length path branch prediction
Proceedings of the eighth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Design tradeoffs for the Alpha EV8 conditional branch predictor
ISCA '02 Proceedings of the 29th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Proceedings of the 30th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
The significance of affectors and affectees correlations for branch prediction
HiPEAC'08 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on High performance embedded architectures and compilers
Improving branch prediction by considering affectors and affectees correlations
Transactions on high-performance embedded architectures and compilers III
Energy-efficient branch prediction with compiler-guided history stack
DATE '12 Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
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The demand for more computation power in high-end embedded systems has put embedded processors on parallel evolution track as the RISC processors. Caches and deeper pipelines are standard features on recent embedded microprocessors. As a result of this, some of the performance penalties associated with branch instructions in RISC processors are becoming more prevalent in these processors. As is the case in RISC architectures, designers have turned to dynamic branch prediction to alleviate this problem. Global correlating branch predictors take advantage of the influence past branches have on future ones. The conditional branch outcomes are recorded in a global history register (GHR). Based on the hypothesis that most correlation is among intra-function branches, we provide a detailed analysis of the Global History Stack (GHS) in this paper. The GHS saves the global history in the return address stack when a call instruction is executed. Following the subsequent return, the history is restored from the stack. In addition, to preserve the correlation between the callee branches and the caller branches following the call instruction, we save a few of the history bits coming from the end of the callee's execution. We also investigate saving the GHR of a function in the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) when it returns so that it can be restored when that function is called again. Our results show that these techniques improve the accuracy of several global history based prediction schemes by 4% on average. Consequently, performance improvements as high as 13% are attained.