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conference paper

Temporal instruction fetch streaming

Ferdman, Michael
•
Wenisch, Thomas F.
•
Ailamaki, Anastasia
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2008
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Microarchitecture
the 41st annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)

L1 instruction-cache misses pose a critical performance bottleneck in commercial server workloads. Cache access latency constraints preclude L1 instruction caches large enough to capture the application, library, and OS instruction working sets of these workloads. To cope with capacity constraints, researchers have proposed instruction prefetchers that use branch predictors to explore future control flow. However, such prefetchers suffer from several fundamental flaws: their lookahead is limited by branch prediction bandwidth, their accuracy suffers from geometrically-compounding branch misprediction probability, and they are ignorant of the cache contents, frequently predicting blocks already present in L1. Hence, L1 instruction misses remain a bottleneck. We propose temporal instruction fetch streaming (TIFS)-a mechanism for prefetching temporally-correlated instruction streams from lower-level caches. Rather than explore a program&psila;s control flow graph, TIFS predicts future instruction-cache misses directly, through recording and replaying recurring L1 instruction miss sequences. In this paper, we first present an information-theoretic offline trace analysis of instruction-miss repetition to show that 94% of L1 instruction misses occur in long, recurring sequences. Then, we describe a practical mechanism to record these recurring sequences in the L2 cache and leverage them for instruction-cache prefetching. Our TIFS design requires less than 5% storage overhead over the baseline L2 cache and improves performance by 11% on average and 24% at best in a suite of commercial server workloads.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/MICRO.2008.4771774
Author(s)
Ferdman, Michael
Wenisch, Thomas F.
Ailamaki, Anastasia
Falsafi, Babak  
Moshovos, Andreas
Date Issued

2008

Published in
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Microarchitecture
Start page

1

End page

10

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
PARSA  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
the 41st annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)

Lake Como, Italy

November

Available on Infoscience
April 6, 2009
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/36968
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