A system level perspective on branch architecture performance

Accurate instruction fetch and branch prediction is increasingly important on today’s wide-issue architectures. Fetch prediction is the process of determining the next instruction to request from the memory subsystem. Branch prediction is the process of predicting the likely out-come of branch instructions. Many branch and fetch prediction architectures have been proposed, from simple static techniques to more sophisticated hardware designs. All these previous studies compare differingbranch predictionarchitectures in terms of misprediction rates, branch penalties, or an idealized cycles per instruction. This paper provides a system-level performance comparison of several branch architectures using a full pipeline-level architectural simulator. The performance of various branch architectures is reported using execution time and cycles-per-instruction. For the programs we measured, our simulations show that having no branch prediction increases the execution time by 27%. By compariso...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1995
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Brad Calder, Dirk Grunwald, Joel S. Emer
• Keywords: Branch Architectures, Branch Prediction, Fetch, Hardware, MICRO 1995