Abstract
Providing adequate data bandwidth is extremely important for a future wide-issue processor to achieve its full performance potential. Adding a large number of ports to a data cache, however, becomes increasingly inefficient and can add to the hardware complexity significantly. This paper takes an alternative or complementary approach for providing more data bandwidth, called data decoupling. This paper especially studies an interesting, yet less explored, behavior of memory access instructions, called access region locality, which is concerned with each static memory instruction and its range of access locations at runtime. Our experimental study using a set of SPEC95 benchmark programs shows that most memory access instructions reference a single region at runtime. Also shown is that it is possible to accurately predict the access region of a memory instruction at runtime by scrutinizing the addressing mode of the instruction and the past access history of it. We describe and evaluate a wide-issue superscalar processor with two distinct sets of memory pipelines and caches, driven by the access region predictor. Experimental results indicate that the proposed mechanism is very effective in providing high memory bandwidth to the processor, resulting in comparable or better performance than a conventional memory design with a heavily multiported data cache that can lead to much higher hardware complexity.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 709-723 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | IEEE Transactions on Computers |
Volume | 50 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 2001 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation under grant numbers MIP-9610379 and CDA-9502979; by the US Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca under contract DABT63-95-C-0127 and ARPA order number D346, and a gift from the Intel Corporation. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the US Army Intelligence Center and Fort Huachuca or the US government. The authors thank Todd Austin and Doug Burger for developing the Simplescalar tool set that has been indispensable for our study. The anonymous referees provided many constructive comments that greatly helped improve the quality of this paper. Sangyeun Cho was supported in part by a doctoral fellowship from the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS). Gyungho Lee was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation under grant number CCR-0073259 and by Alpha Processor, Inc.
Keywords
- Data bandwidth
- Data locality
- Data stream partitioning
- Instruction level parallelism
- Multiported data cache
- Runtime stack