SpMT WaveCache: Exploiting Thread-Level Parallelism in WaveScalar

Speculative multithreading (SpMT) increases the performance by means of executing multiple threads speculatively to exploit thread-level parallelism. By combining software and hardware approaches, we have improved the capabilities of previous WaveScalar ISA on the basis of transactional memory system for the WaveCache Architecture. Threads are extracted at the course of static compiling, and speculatively executed as a thread-level transaction that is supported by extra hardware components, such as thread-context-table (TCT) and thread-memory-history (TMH). We have evaluated the SpMT WaveCache with 6 real benchmarks from SPEC, Mediabench and Mibench. On the whole, the SpMT WaveCache outperforms superscalar architecture ranging from 2times to 3times, and great performance gains are achieved over original WaveCache and transactional WaveCache as well.