• 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 Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.41 no.6
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• pp.1-11
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• 2004

Modern processors achieve high performance exploiting avaliable Instruction Level Parallelism(ILP) by using speculative technique such as branch prediction. Traditionally, branch direction can be predicted at very high accuracy by 2-level predictor, and branch target address is predicted by Branch Target Buffer(BTB). Except for indirect branch, each of the branch has the unique target, so its prediction is very accurate via BTB. But because indirect branch has dynamically polymorphic target, indirect branch target prediction is very difficult. In general, the technique of branch direction prediction is applied to indirect branch target prediction, and much better accuracy than traditional BTB is obtained for indirect branch. We present a new indirect branch target prediction scheme which combines a indirect branch instruction with its data dependent register of the instruction executed earlier than the branch. The result of SPEC benchmark simulation which are obtained on SimpleScalar simulator shows that the proposed predictor obtains the most perfect prediction accuracy than any other existing scheme.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.1651-1654
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• 2004

파이프라인과 슈퍼스칼라 방식이 일반화된 시스템 구조 하에서, 분기 명령어는 시스템 전체적인 성능에 중요한 영향을 미친다. 특히 분기 예측이 실패했을 경우, 잘못된 분기 예측으로 인한 페널티가 발생한다는 점에서 분기 예측의 정확도에 대한 중요성은 크다고 할 수 있다. 본 논문에서는 분기 예측의 정확도를 높이기 위해서, 분기 예측과 관련된 신경망을 구축하여 이를 통해 분기 예측에 필요한 각 요소별 가중치의 변화를 분석하고, 이를 분기 예측에 새롭게 반영하고자 한다. 본 논문에서는 이를 위해 실행 구동 방식의 시뮬레이터인 SimpleScalar를 통하여 모의 실험을 수행하였으며, 실험 결과 본 논문에서 제시한 새로운 기법이 기존의 일반적인 이단계 적응형 분기 예측 기법이나 gshare 기법에 비하여 더 우수한 결과를 보였다.

• 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 Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.19-30
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• 2008

Branch history is one of major input vectors in branch prediction. Therefore, the Proper use of branch history plays a critical role of improving branch prediction accuracy. To improve branch prediction accuracy, this paper proposes a new branch history management policy, based on interrelationship analysis of instructions. First of all, we propose three different algorithms to analyze the relationship: register-writhing method, branch-reading method, and merged method. Then we additionally propose variable input gshare predictor as an implementation of these algorithms. In simulation part, we provide performance differences among the algorithms and analyze their characteristics. In addition, we compare branch prediction accuracy between our proposals and conventional fixed input predictors. The performance comparison for optimal input branch predictor is also provided.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.44 no.2 s.314
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• pp.1-10
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• 2007

Branch prediction accuracy is critical for the overall system performance. Branch miss-prediction penalty is the one of the significant performance limiters for improving processor performance, as the pipeline deepens and the instruction issued per cycle increases. In this paper, we propose "Dynamic Per-Branch History Length Fitting Method" by tracking the data dependencies among the register writing instructions. The proposed solution first identifies the key branches, and then it selectively uses the histories of the key branches. To support this mechanism, we provide a history length adjustment algorithm and a required hardware module. As the result of simulation, the proposed mechanism outperforms the previous fixed static method, up to 5.96% in prediction accuracy. Furthermore, our method introduces the performance improvement, compared to the profiled results which are generally considered as the optimal ones.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.14 no.10
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• pp.1-10
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• 2009

Precise branch predictor has a profound impact on system performance in modern processor architectures. Recent works show that prediction latency as well as prediction accuracy has a critical impact on overall system performance as well. However, prediction latency tends to be overlooked. In this paper, we propose Branch Pre-Prediction policy to tolerate branch prediction latency. The proposed solution allows that branch predictor can proceed its prediction without any information from the fetch engine, separating the prediction engine from fetch stage. In addition, we propose newly modified BTE structure to support our solution. The simulation result shows that proposed solution can hide most prediction latency with still providing the same level of prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed solution shows even better performance than the ideal case, that is the predictor which always takes a single cycle prediction latency. In our experiments, IPC improvement is up to 11.92% and 5.15% in average, compared to conventional predictor system.

• 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.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.15A no.4
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• pp.217-226
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• 2008

Branch prediction accuracy is critical for system performance in modern microprocessor architectures. The use of speculative update branch history provides substantial accuracy improvement in branch prediction. However, speculative update branch history is the information about uncommitted branch instruction and thus it may hurts program correctness, in case of miss-speculative execution. Therefore, speculative update branch history requires suitable recovery mechanisms to provide program correctness as well as performance improvement. In this paper, we propose recovery logics for speculative update branch history. The proposed solutions are recovery logics for both global history and local history. In simulation results, our solution provides performance improvement up to 5.64%. In addition, it guarantees the program correctness and almost 90% of additional hardware overhead is reduced, compared to previous works.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.766-768
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• 2005

분기 영령어의 예측 정확도는 시스템 전체 성능에 중대한 영향을 미친다. 여러 분기 예측 방식 가운데 하나인 "분기 정보의 투기적 사용" 은 분기 명령어의 가장 최근 기록을 일관되게 사용할 수 있도록 도와줌으로 해서 분기 예측의 정확도 향상에 크게 기여한다. 하지만 이와 같은 기법은 미완료 분기에 대한 히스토리를 투기적으로 사용하는 방식이다. 따라서 사용되는 정보가 올바르지 못할 수 있으며, 이런 경우 적절한 복구 기법을 필요로 한다. 본 논문에서는 분기 정보의 투기적 사용에 대한 필요성과 효율적인 복구 기법을 제안한다. 제안된 기법은 이전 연구와 비교하여 상당한 하드웨어 요구량의 감소를 가져왔으며, 또한 프로그램 수행의 정확성을 해치지 않으면서 최대 $3.3\%$의 성능향상을 보였다.