PFetch

CPU speeds have increased faster than the rate of improvement in memory access latencies in the recent past. As a result, with programs that suffer excessive cache misses, the CPU will increasingly be stalled waiting for the memory system to provide the requested memory line. Prefetching is a latency hiding technique that tackles this problem. If the address of the memory line that misses in cache can be predicted sufficiently in advance, it can be prefetched into the cache before it is accessed, reducing the effective latency of that access.