• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.44 no.1
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• pp.33-40
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• 2007

Processor pipelines have been growing deeper and issue widths wider over the years. If this trend continues, the branch misprediction penalty will become very high. Branch misprediction is the single most significant performance limiter for improving processor performance using deeper pipelining. Therefore, more accurate branch predictor becomes an essential part of modern processors. Several branch predictors combine a part of the branch address with a fixed amount of global branch history to make a prediction. These predictors cannot perform uniformly well across all programs because the best amount of branch history to be used depends on the program and branches in the program. Therefore, predictors that use a fixed history length are unable to perform up to their potential performance. In this paper, we propose a branch prediction mechanism, using variable length history, which predicts using a bank having higher prediction accuracy among predictions from five banks. Bank 0 is a bimodal predictor which is indexed with the 12 least significant bits of the branch address. Banks 1, 2, 3 and 4 are predictors which are indexed with different global history bits and the branch PC. In simulation results, the proposed mechanism outperforms gshare predictors using fixed history length of 12 and 13 , up to 6.34% in prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism outperforms gshare predictors using best history lengths for benchmarks, up to 2.3% in prediction accuracy.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.26 no.9
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• pp.1158-1165
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• 1999

조건부 분기 명령어(conditional branch instruction)의 잘못된 분기 예측(branch misprediction)은 프로세서의 성능 향상에 심각한 장애 요인이 되고 있다. 특히 시분할(time-sharing) 시스템과 같이 문맥 교환(context switch)이 발생하는 멀티프로그래밍 환경(multiprogramming environment)에서는 더욱 낮은 분기 예측 정확성(branch prediction accuracy)을 보인다. 본 논문에서는 문맥 교환이 발생하는 멀티프로그래밍 환경에서 높은 분기 예측 정확성을 보이는 중첩 분기 예측표 교환(Overlapped Predictor Table Switch, OPTS) 기법을 소개한다. 분기 예측표(predictor table)를 분할하여 각각의 프로세스(process)에 할당하는 OPTS 기법은 문맥 교환의 영향을 최소화함으로써 높은 분기 예측 정확성을 유지하는 분기 예측 방법이다.Abstract There is wide agreement that one of the most important impediments to the performance of current and future pipelined superscalar processors is the presence of conditional branches in the instruction stream. Accurate branch prediction is required to overcome this performance limitation. Many branch predictors have been proposed to help to alleviate this problem, including the two-level adaptive branch predictor, and more recently, hybrid branch predictor. In a less idealized environment, such as a time-sharing system, code of interest involves context switches. Context switches, even at fairly large intervals, can seriously degrade the performance of many of the most accurate branch prediction schemes. In this study, we measure the effect of context switch on the branch prediction accuracy in various situation and show the feasibility of our new mechanism, OPTS(Overlapped Predictor Table Switch), which save and restore branch history table at every context switch.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.5 no.10
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• pp.2676-2685
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• 1998

In order to improve the branch prediction accuracy and to reduce the BTB miss rate, this paper proposes a two-level BTB structure that adds small-sized victim BTB to the convetional BTB. With small cost, two-level BTB can reduce the BTB miss rate as well as improve the prediction accuracy of the hybrid branch prediction strategy which combines dynamic prediction and static prediction. Through the trace-driven simulation of four bechmark programs, the performance improvement by the proposed two-level BTB structure is analysed and validated. Our proposed BTB structure can improve the BTB miss rate by 26.5% and the misprediction rate by 26.75%

• Agribusiness and Information Management
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.43-60
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• 2009

To improve the performance of wide-issue superscalar processors, it is essential to increase the width of instruction fetch and the issue rate. Removal of control hazard has been put forward as a significant new source of instruction-level parallelism for superscalar processors and the conditional branch prediction is an important technique for improving processor performance. Branch mispredictions, however, waste a large number of cycles, inhibit out-of-order execution, and waste electric power on mis-speculated instructions. Hence, the branch predictor with higher accuracy is necessary for good processor performance. In global-history-based predictors like gshare and GAg, many mispredictions come from commit update of the branch history. Some works on this subject have discussed the need for speculative update of the history and recovery mechanisms for branch mispredictions. In this paper, we present a new mechanism for recovering the branch history after a misprediction. The proposed mechanism adds an age_counter to the original predictor and doubles the size of the branch history register. The age_counter counts the number of outstanding branches and uses it to recover the branch history register. Simulation results on the SimpleScalar 3.0/PISA tool set and the SPECINT95 benchmarks show that gshare and GAg with the proposed recovery mechanism improved the average prediction accuracy by 2.14% and 9.21%, respectively and the average IPC by 8.75% and 18.08%, respectively over the original predictor.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.4 no.5
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• pp.366-370
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• 2015

This paper proposes a method for improving a branch predictor for the extendable instruction set computer (EISC) processor. The original EISC branch predictor has several shortcomings: a small branch target buffer, absence of a global history, a one-bit local branch history, and unsupported prediction of branches following LERI, which is a special instruction to extend an immediate value. We adopt a G-share branch predictor and eliminate the existing shortcomings. We verified the new branch predictor on a field-programmable gate array with the Dhrystone benchmark. The newly proposed EISC branch predictor also accomplishes higher branch prediction accuracy than a conventional branch predictor.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.23-30
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• 2001

ILP processors require an accurate branch prediction scheme to achieve higher performance. Two-Level branch predictor has been known to achieve high prediction accuracy. But, when a branch accesses a PHT entry that was, previously updated by other branch, Two-level predictor may cause interferences. Negative interferences among all interferences have a negative effect on performance, since they can cause branch mispredictions. Agree predictor achieve high prediction accuracy by converting negative interferences to positive interferences by adding bias bits to BTB, but negative interferences may occur when bias bit is set incorrectly. This paper presents a new dynamic branch predictor which reduces negative interferences. In the proposed predictor, we attach hit bits to entries in BTB to change bias bit dynamically during the execution time, h a result the proposed scheme improve the accuracy of prediction by reducing negative Interferences effectively, To illustrate the effect of the proposed scheme, we evaluate the performance of this scheme using SPEC92int benchmarks, The results show that the proposed scheme can outperform traditional branch predictors.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.15A no.4
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• pp.217-226
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• 2008

Branch prediction accuracy is critical for system performance in modern microprocessor architectures. The use of speculative update branch history provides substantial accuracy improvement in branch prediction. However, speculative update branch history is the information about uncommitted branch instruction and thus it may hurts program correctness, in case of miss-speculative execution. Therefore, speculative update branch history requires suitable recovery mechanisms to provide program correctness as well as performance improvement. In this paper, we propose recovery logics for speculative update branch history. The proposed solutions are recovery logics for both global history and local history. In simulation results, our solution provides performance improvement up to 5.64%. In addition, it guarantees the program correctness and almost 90% of additional hardware overhead is reduced, compared to previous works.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.899-902
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• 2005

Pipeline hazard due to branch instructions is the major factor of the degradation on the performance of microprocessors. Branch target buffer predicts whether a branch will be taken or not and supplies the address of the next instruction on the basis of that prediction. If the branch target buffer predicts correctly, the instruction flow will not be stalled. This leads to the better performance of microprocessor. In this paper, the architecture of a tag memory that branch target buffer and TLB can share is presented. Because the two tag memories used for branch target buffer and TLB each is replaced by single shared tag memory, we can expect the smaller ship size and the faster prediction. This hared tag architecture is more advantageous for the microprocessors that uses more bits of address and exploits much more instruction level parallelism.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1999.06a
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• pp.1009-1012
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• 1999

An analytical performance model that can predict the performance of a superscalar processor employing multiple branch prediction is introduced. The model is based on the conditional independence probability and the basic block size of instructions, with the degree of multiple branch prediction, the fetch rate, and the window size of a superscalar architecture. Trace driven simulation is performed for the subset of SPEC integer benchmarks, and the measured IPCs are compared with the results derived from the model. As the result, our analytic model could predict the performance of the superscalar processor using multiple branch prediction within 6.6 percent on the average.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.58 no.7
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• pp.1443-1449
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• 2009

This paper presents a profiling model of a wide-window superscalar microprocessor using multiple branch prediction. The key idea is to apply statistical profiling technique to the superscalar microprocessor with a wide instruction window and a multiple branch predictor. The statistical profiling data are used to obtain a synthetical instruction trace, and the consecutive multiple branch prediction rates are utilized for running trace-driven simulation on the synthesized instruction trace. We describe our design and evaluate it with the SPEC 2000 integer benchmarks. Our performance model can achieve accuracy of 8.5 % on the average.