An Effective Programmable Prefetch Engine for On-Chip Caches
Tien-Fu Chen
Abstract
In this paper, we consider a prefetch engine called Hare, which handles
prefetches at run time and is built in supporting on-chip data cache
for high-performance processors. The key design is that it is
programmable by user code so that techniques of software prefetching
can be also employed in exploiting the benefits of prefetching. The
engine always drives prefetches ahead of current execution, which is
controlled by the program counter. We evaluate the proposed scheme by
trace-driven simulation and consider area and cycle time factors for
the evaluation of cost-effectiveness. Our performance results show that
the prefetch engine can provide significant data access penalty with
only least prefetching overhead.
Keywords
data prefetch, programmable engine, software prefetch,
compiler optimization
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