A New Technology of Multi-core Prefetching

AbstractMemory access latency is a main bottleneck limiting further improvement of multi-core processor's performance, data prefetching is an effective technique to hide data access latency. This paper proposes a new hardware prefetching technique based on Future execution that integrates Runahead execution. Future execution uses one core of CMP to prefetch date for a thread running on another core. Runahead execution is an out of order execution technique that allows microprocessors pre-process instructions during cache miss cycles instead of stalling. We named the prefetching technique Future-runahead execution, and experiment result reveals that the relative execution time of Future-runahead execution tested by SPEC2000 program reduced by 8% and L2 Cache hit ratio increased by 9% compared to Future execution