Title :
Diverge-Merge Processor: Generalized and Energy-Efficient Dynamic Predication
Author :
Kim, Hyesoon ; Joao, Jose A. ; Mutlu, Onur ; Patt, Yale N.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Texas Univ., Austin, TX
Abstract :
The branch misprediction penalty is a major performance limiter and a major cause of wasted energy in high-performance processors. The diverge-merge processor reduces this penalty by dynamically predicating a wide range of hard-to-predict branches at runtime in an energy-efficient way that doesn´t significantly increase hardware complexity or require major ISA changes
Keywords :
microprocessor chips; parallel architectures; program compilers; branch misprediction penalty; diverge-merge processor; energy-efficient dynamic predication; hardware complexity; high-performance processor; Clocks; Energy efficiency; Frequency; Hardware; Instruction sets; Parallel processing; Pipeline processing; Registers; Runtime; adaptivity; branch prediction; dynamic predication; energy efficiency; instruction level parallelism; pipelining; predication;
Journal_Title :
Micro, IEEE
