A lightweight speculative and predicative scheme for hardware execution

If-conversion is a known software technique to speedup applications containing conditional expressions and targeting processors with predication support. However, the success of this scheme is highly dependent on the structure of the if-statements, i.e., if they are balanced or unbalanced, as well as on the path taken. Therefore, the predication scheme does not always provide a better execution time than the conventional jump scheme. In this paper, we present an algorithm that leverages the benefits of both jump and predication schemes adapted for hardware execution. The results show that performance degradation is not possible anymore for the unbalanced if-statements as well as a speedup for all test cases between 4% and 21%.