The impact of unresolved branches on branch prediction scheme performance

  • Authors:

  • A. R. Talcott;W. Yamamoto;M. J. Serrano;R. C. Wood;M. Nemirovsky

  • Affiliations:

  • Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA;Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA;Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA;Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA;National Semiconductor Corporation, 2900 Semiconductor Drive, M.S. E-280, Santa Clara, CA

  • Venue:
  • ISCA '94 Proceedings of the 21st annual international symposium on Computer architecture
  • Year:
  • 1994

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Abstract

In this paper, we examine the benefits of the early resolution of branch instructions and the impact of unresolved branches on history-based branch prediction schemes by using two new metrics that are more revealing than branch prediction accuracy alone. We first briefly review a number of branch prediction schemes and introduce two new branch prediction scheme performance metrics. We then utilize these metrics to gauge the improvement in branch prediction scheme performance when only the outcomes of unresolved branches are predicted. Finally, we examine two approaches for handling multiple unresolved branches in history-based branch prediction schemes, and determine that prediction accuracy remains quite stable when older branch histories are used.