Improving Multicore Architectures by Selective Value Prediction of High-Latency Arithmetic Instructions

Abstract

This work is an original contribution consisting in the implementation and evaluation of a selective value predictor in a multicore environment, with focus on long latency arithmetical instructions, having the goal to break the dataflow bottleneck of each core, thus increasing the overall performance. The Sniper simulator was used to augment the Intel Nehalem architecture with a value predictor and to estimate the computing performance, area of integration, power consumption, energy efficiency and chip temperature for the enhanced architecture. We run simulations and study the impact of the number of values which are used for prediction for each instruction. By increasing the history length, we measured on average more than 3 % increase in performance (core speed-up), a reduction in chip temperature from 57.8 C to 56.17 C, and lower energy consumption in most cases compared with the baseline configuration. We also realized a comparison between the value prediction and dynamic instruction reuse techniques in equitable condition (to exploit the same value locality), where we highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each technique in the given context.

Keywords

• multicore processing
• computer simulation
• prediction methods
• benchmark testing
• microprocessors