Improving the performance of object-oriented languages with dynamic predication of indirect jumps

Indirect jump instructions are used to implement increasinglycommon programming constructs such as virtual function calls, switch-case statements, jump tables, and interface calls. The performance impact of indirect jumps is likely to increase because indirect jumps with multiple targets are difficult to predict even with specialized hardware. This paper proposes a new way of handling hard-to-predict indirect jumps: dynamically predicating them. The compiler (static or dynamic) identifies indirect jumps that are suitable for predication along with their control-flow merge (CFM) points. The hardware predicates the instructions between different targets of the jump and its CFM point if the jump turns out to be hard-to-predict at run time. If the jump would actually have been mispredicted, its dynamic predication eliminates a pipeline flush, thereby improving performance. Our evaluations show that Dynamic Indirect jump Predication (DIP) improves the performance of a set of object-oriente...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: José A. Joao, Onur Mutlu, Hyesoon Kim, Rishi Agarwal, Yale N. Patt
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2008, Indirect Jump, Indirect Jump Instructions, Indirect Jump Predication, Programming Languages