EOLE: Paving the way for an effective implementation of value prediction

Even in the multicore era, there is a continuous demand to increase the performance of single-threaded applications. However, the conventional path of increasing both issue width and instruction window size inevitably leads to the power wall. Value prediction (VP) was proposed in the mid 90’s as an alternative path to further enhance the performance of wide-issue superscalar processors. Still, it was considered up to recently that a performance-effective implementation of Value Prediction would add tremendous complexity and power consumption in almost every stage of the pipeline. Nonetheless, recent work in the field of VP has shown that given an efficient confidence estimation mechanism, prediction validation could be removed from the out-of-order engine and delayed until commit time. As a result, recovering fro