• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.99 no.2
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• pp.204-212
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• 2010

This study was performed in 22 unthinned Larix olgensis plantations in northeast China. Data were collected on 95 sample trees of different canopy positions and the diameter at breast height ($d_{1.3}$) ranged from 5.7 cm to 40.2 cm. The individual tree models for the prediction of vertical distribution of live crown, branch and needle biomass were built. Our study showed that the crown, branch and needle biomass distributions were most in the location of 60% crown length. These results were also parallel to previous crown studies. The cumulative relative biomass of live crown, branch and needle were fitted by the sigmoid shape curve and the fitting results were quite well. Meanwhile, we developed the crown ratio and width models. Tree height was the most important predictor for crown ratio model. A negative competition factor, ccf and bas which reflected the effect of suppression on a tree, reduced the crown ratio estimates. The height-diameter ratio was a significant predictor. The higher the height-diameter ratio, the higher crown ratio is. Diameter at breast height is the strongest predictor in crown width model. The models can be used for the planning of harvesting operations, for the selection of feasible harvesting methods, and for the estimation of nutrient removals of different harvesting practices.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.306-313
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• 2005

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 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 simple 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 SPECINTgS 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.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.43 no.4 s.310
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• pp.1-14
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• 2006

The indirect branch instruction is a most substantial obstacle in utilizing ILP of modem high performance processors. The target address of an indirect branch has the polymorphic characteristic varied dynamically, so it is very difficult to predict the accurate target address. Therefore the performance of a processor with speculative methodology is reduced significantly due to the many execution cycle delays in occurring the misprediction. We proposed the very accurate and novel indirect branch prediction scheme so called data-dependence based prediction. The predictor results in the prediction accuracy of 98.92% using 1K entries, and. 99.95% using 8K But, all of the proposed indirect predictor including our predictor has a large hardware overhead for restoring expected target addresses as well as tags for alleviating an aliasing. Hence, we propose the scheme minimizing the hardware overhead without sacrificing the prediction accuracy. Our experiment results show that the hardware is reduced about 60% without the performance loss, and about 80% sacrificing only the performance loss of 0.1% in aspect of the tag overhead. Also, in aspect of the overhead of storing target addresses, it can save the hardware about 35% without the performance loss, and about 45% sacrificing only the performance loss of 1.11%.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.38B no.1
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• pp.10-17
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• 2013

This thesis proposes an automatic embedded core generator system that supports branch prediction. The proposed system includes a dynamic branch prediction module that enhances execution speed of target applications by inserting history/direction flags into BTAC(Branch Target Address Cache). Entries of BHT(Branch History Table) and BTAC are determined based on branch informations extracted by simulation. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed branch prediction module, ARM9TDMI core including a dynamic branch predictor was described in SMDL and generated. Experimental results show that as the number of entry rises, area increase up to 60% while application execution cycle and BTAC miss rate drop by an average of 1.7% and 9.6%, respectively.

• 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.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.9A no.4
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• pp.497-502
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• 2002

Conditional branches can severely limit the performance of instruction level parallelism by causing branch penalties. 2-level adaptive branch predictors were developed to get accurate branch prediction in high performance superscalar processors. Although 2 level adaptive branch predictors achieve very high prediction accuracy, they tend to be very costly. In this paper, set-associative cached correlated 2-level branch predictors are proposed to overcome the cost problem in conventional 2-level adaptive branch predictors. According to simulation results, cached correlated predictors deliver higher prediction accuracy than conventional predictors at a significantly lower cost. The best misprediction rates of global and local cached correlated predictors using set-associative caches are 5.99% and 6.28% respectively. They achieve 54% and 17% improvements over those of the conventional 2-level adaptive branch predictors.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.21 no.9
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• pp.1-9
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• 2016

Recent embedded processors employ set-associative L1 instruction cache to improve the performance. The energy consumption in the set-associative L1 instruction cache accounts for considerable portion in the embedded processor. When an instruction is required from the processor, all ways in the set-associative instruction cache are accessed in parallel. In this paper, we propose the technique to reduce the energy consumption in the set-associative L1 instruction cache effectively by accessing only one way. Gshare branch predictor is employed to predict the instruction flow and determine the way to fetch the instruction. When the branch prediction is untaken, next instruction in a sequential order can be fetched from the instruction cache by accessing only one way. According to our simulations with SPEC2006 benchmarks, the proposed technique requires negligible hardware overhead and shows 20% energy reduction on average in 4-way L1 instruction cache.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.9-26
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• 2005

In the pursuit of ever higher levels of performance, recent computer systems have made use of deep pipeline, dynamic scheduling and multi-issue superscalar processor technologies. In this situations, branch prediction schemes are an essential part of modem microarchitectures because the penalty for a branch misprediction increases as pipelines deepen and the number of instructions issued per cycle increases. In this paper, we propose a novel branch prediction scheme, direction-gshare(d-gshare), to improve the prediction accuracy. At first, we model a neural network with the components that possibly affect the branch prediction accuracy, and analyze the variation of their weights based on the neural network information. Then, we newly add the component that has a high weight value to an original gshare scheme. We simulate our branch prediction scheme using Simple Scalar, a powerful event-driven simulator, and analyze the simulation results. Our results show that, compared to bimodal, two-level adaptive and gshare predictor, direction-gshare predictor(d-gshare. 3) outperforms, without additional hardware costs, by up to 4.1% and 1.5% in average for the default mont of embedded direction, and 11.8% in maximum and 3.7% in average for the optimal one.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2001.04a
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• pp.22-24
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• 2001

슈퍼스칼라 프로세서에서는 분기 명령의 결과 지연으로 명령의 공급이 중단되는 것을 방지하고 지속적인 파이프라인 처리를 위해서 분기의 결과를 미리 예측하여 명령을 폐치하고 있다. 본 논문에서는 심플스칼라 툴 셋을 사용하여 슈퍼스칼라 프로세서에서 사용되는 대표적인 동적 분기예측 방법 시뮬레이션 환경을 구축한다. 동적 분기예측 방법으로 분기 타겟버퍼(Branch Target Buffer, BTB) 상에서 분기명령의 자기 히스토리에 근거한 BTB 방식과 이전 분기명령의 히스토리와의 상관관계를 고려한 Gshare 분기예측기를 적용 구현한다. 심플스칼라 시뮬레이터에 SPEC95 벤치마크 프로그램을 실행시켜 디자인 파라미터 변화에 따른 분기 예측기의 예측정확도를 실험한다. 또한 BTB와 Gshare 분기예측기를 VHDL로 구현하고 Synopsys 툴을 이용하여 시뮬레이션 및 합성 과정을 거쳐 게이트 크기와 파워 소모량을 측정한다.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.297-305
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• 2006

Trace-driven simulation is widely used for measuring the performance of a microprocessor in its initial design phase. However, since it requires much time and disk space, the statistical simulation has been studied as an alternative method. In this paper, statistical simulations are performed for a high performance superscalar microprocessor with a perceptron-based multiple branch predictor. For the verification, various hardware configurations are simulated using SPEC2000 benchmarks programs as input. As a result, we show that the statistical simulation is quite accurate and time saving for the evaluation of microprocessor architectures with multiple branch prediction.