A Branch Prediction Mechanism With Adaptive Branch History Length for FAFF Information Processing

농림수산식품분야 정보처리를 위한 적응하는 분기히스토리 길이를 갖는 분기예측 메커니즘

Pipelines of processor have been growing deeper and issue widths wider over the years. If this trend continues, 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 modem processors for FAFF(Food, Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries)Information Processing. 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 PC. 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.