ASPLOS IV Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
PA-RISC 2.0 architecture
Highly accurate data value prediction using hybrid predictors
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Hardware-driven prefetching for pointer data references
ICS '98 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Supercomputing
A New Voting Based Hardware Data Prefetch Scheme
HIPC '97 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on High-Performance Computing
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In this paper, we introduce a new concept of run-time collaboration between hardware and software prefetching mechanisms. An association bit is added to a memory access instruction (MAI) to indicate if any software PREFETCH instruction corresponding to the MAI has been inserted into the program. This bit is set by the compiler. Default hardware prefetching might be triggered for a MAI only if a "1" is detected in this bit. Simulation on SPEC95 shows that this association concept is very useful in HW/SW hybrid prefetching; its performance improvement in floating point applications ranges from a few percent to about 60%, with an average of 28.63%. This concept is important because its requirements for hardware and compiler support are very minimal. Furthermore, most existing architectures actually have unused encoding space that can be used to hold the association information.