Repository logo

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Infoscience

  • English
  • French
Log In
  1. Home
  2. Academic and Research Output
  3. Conferences, Workshops, Symposiums, and Seminars
  4. Temporal instruction fetch streaming
 
conference paper

Temporal instruction fetch streaming

Ferdman, Michael
•
Wenisch, Thomas F.
•
Ailamaki, Anastasia
Show more
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.

  • Files
  • Details
  • Metrics
Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Name

tifs_micro08.pdf

Access type

openaccess

Size

485.61 KB

Format

Adobe PDF

Checksum (MD5)

ab9b8a4cdf2943dff7f9b29fc4639ed8

Logo EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
  • Contact
  • infoscience@epfl.ch

  • Follow us on Facebook
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on LinkedIn
  • Follow us on X
  • Follow us on Youtube
AccessibilityLegal noticePrivacy policyCookie settingsEnd User AgreementGet helpFeedback

Infoscience is a service managed and provided by the Library and IT Services of EPFL. © EPFL, tous droits réservés