Execution characteristics of desktop applications on Windows NT
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Predicting indirect branches via data compression
MICRO 31 Proceedings of the 31st annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Introducing entropies for representing program behavior and branch predictor performance
Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Experimental computer science
Introducing entropies for representing program behaviors and branch predictor performances
ecs'07 Experimental computer science on Experimental computer science
Potentials of branch predictors: from entropy viewpoints
ARCS'08 Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Architecture of computing systems
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Indirect branch prediction is likely to become more important in the future because indi rect branches tend to be more frequent in object-oriented programs. With indirect branch prediction misprediction rates of around 25% on current processors, such branches can incur a significant fraction of branch misses even though indirect branches are less frequent than the more predictable conditional branches. We investigate the predictability of indirect branches to determine whether the inferior accuracy of the current indirect branch prediction mechanism (branch target buffers) results from an intrinsic unpredictability of indirect branches or is caused by suboptimal branch prediction hardware. Using programs from the SPECint95 suite as well as a suite of C++ applications, we show that prediction accuracy can exceed 95% on average for these benchmarks, assuming an unlimited hardware budget. This result suggests that better indirect branch prediction hard ware can significantly outperform current branch target buffers.