Comparing Software and Hardware Schemes For Reducing the Cost of Branches

Pipelining has become a common technique to increase throughput of the instruction fetch, instruction decode, and instruction execution portions of modern computers. Branch instructions disrupt the ow of instructions through the the pipeline, increasing the overall execution cost of branch instructions. Three schemes to reduce the cost of branches are presented in the context of a general pipeline model. Ten realistic Unix domain programs are used to directly compare the cost and performance of the three schemes and the results are in favor of the software-based scheme. For example, the software-based

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1989
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Wen-mei W. Hwu, Thomas M. Conte, Pohua P. Chang
• Keywords: Branch Instructions, Hardware, Instruction Execution Portions, Instructions, ISCA 1989