Transparent control independence (TCI)

AL-ZAWAWI, AHMED SAMI. Transparent Control Independence (TCI). (Under the direction of Dr. Eric Rotenberg). Superscalar architectures have been proposed that exploit control independence, reducing the performance penalty of branch mispredictions by preserving the work of future misprediction-independent instructions. The essential goal of exploiting control independence is to completely decouple future misprediction-independent instructions from deferred misprediction-dependent instructions. Current implementations fall short of this goal because they explicitly maintain program order among misprediction-independent and misprediction-dependent instructions. Explicit approaches sacrifice design efficiency and ultimately performance. We observe it is sufficient to emulate program order. Potential misprediction-dependent instructions are singled out a priori and their unchanging source values are checkpointed. These instructions and values are set aside as a “recovery program”. Check...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Ahmed S. Al-Zawawi, Vimal K. Reddy, Eric Rotenberg, Haitham Akkary
• Keywords: Control Independence, Hardware, ISCA 2007, Misprediction-dependent Instructions, Misprediction-independent Instructions