Adaptive Reorder Buffers for SMT Processors

In SMT processors, the complex interplay between private and shared datapath resources needs to be considered in order to realize the full performance potential. In this paper, we show that blindly increasing the size of the per-thread reorder buffers to provide a larger number of in-flight instructions does not result in the expected performance gains but, quite in contrast, degrades the instruction throughput for virtually all multithreaded workloads. The reason for this performance loss is the excessive pressure on the shared datapath resources, especially the instruction scheduling logic. We propose intelligent mechanisms for dynamically adapting the number of reorder buffer entries allocated to each thread in an effort to avoid such allocations if they detrimentally impact the scheduler. We achieve this goal through categorizing the program execution into issue-bound and commit-bound phases and only performing the buffer allocations to the threads operating in commit-bound phases. Our adaptive technique achieves improvements of 21 % in instruction throughput and 10 % in the fairness metric compared to the best performing baseline configuration with static ROBs