Data Access Microarchitectures for Superscalar Processors with Compiler-Assisted Data Prefetching

The performance of superscalar processors is more sensitive to the memory system delay than their single-issue predecessors. This paper examines alternative data access microarchitectures that effectively support compilerassisted data prefetching in superscalar processors. In particular, a prefetch buffer is shown to be more effective than increasing the cache dimension in solving the cache pollution problem. All in all, we show that a small data cache with compiler-assisted data prefetching can achieve a performance level close to that of an ideal cache. 1 Introduction Superscalar processors can potentially deliver more than five times speedup over conventional single-issue processors [1]. With the total execution cycle count dramatically reduced, each cycle becomes more significant to the overall performance. Because each data cache miss can introduce many extra execution cycles, a superscalar processor can easily lose the majority of its performance to the memory hierarchy. Out-of-..