Dynamic Data Dependence Tracking and its Application to Branch Prediction

To continue to improve processor performance, microarchitects seek to increase the effective instruction level parallelism (ILP) that can be exploited in applications. A fundamental limit to improving ILP is data dependences among instructions. If data dependence information is available at run-time, there are many uses to improve ILP. Prior published examples include decoupled branch execution architectures and critical instruction detection. In this paper, we describe an efficient hardware mechanism to dynamically track the data dependence chains of the instructions in the pipeline. This information is available on a cycle-by-cycle basis to the microengine for optimizing its performance. We then use this design in a new value-based branch prediction design using Available Register Value Information (ARVI). From the use of data dependence information, the ARVI branch predictor has better prediction accuracy over a comparably sized hybrid branch predictor. With ARVI used as the second...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Lei Chen, Steve Dropsho, David H. Albonesi
• Keywords: ARVI Branch Predictor, Computer Architecture, HPCA 2003, Hybrid Branch Predictor, Second-level Branch Predictor