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An Efficient Instruction Prefetching Scheme Based on the Page Access Information  

Shin Soong-Hyun (서울대학교 전기 컴퓨터공학부)
Kim Cheol-Hong (서울대학교 전기 컴퓨터공학부)
Jhon Chu-Shik (서울대학교 전기 컴퓨터공학부)
Publication Information
Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory / v.33, no.5, 2006 , pp. 306-315 More about this Journal
Abstract
In general, the hit ratio of the first level cache is one of the most important factors in determining the performance of computer systems. Prefetching from lower level memory structure is one of the most useful techniques for improving the hit ratio of the first level cache. In this paper, we propose a prefetch on continuous same page access (CSPA) scheme which improves the prefetch efficiency of the instruction cache and reduces prefetch cost at the same time. The proposed CSPA scheme traces the page addresses of executed instructions to count how many times the same memory page is accessed continuously. To increase the prefetch efficiency, the CSPA scheme initiates prefetch only if the number of accesses to the same page exceeds the threshold value. Generally, the size of a L1 cache block is smaller than that of a L2 cache block. Therefore, one L2 cache block contains a number of L1 cache blocks. To reduce the number of unnecessary accesses to the L2 cache due to prefetch, the CSPA scheme enables prefetch only when the missed L1 block and the prefetch L1 block are in the same L2 cache block, leading to reduced prefetch cost. According to our simulations, the proposed prefetching scheme improves the performance by up to 6.7%.
Keywords
Computer architecture; Instruction cache; Cache prefetch;
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