Sepculative Updates of a Stride Value Predictor in Wide-Issue Processors

In superscalar processors, value prediction is a technique that breaks true data dependences by predicting the outcome of an instruction in order to exploit instruction level parallelism(ILP). A value predictor looks up the prediction table for the prediction value of an instruction in the instruction fetch stage, and updates with the prediction result and the resolved value after the execution of the instruction for the next prediction. However, as the instruction fetch and issue rates are increased, the same instruction is likely to fetch again before is has been updated in the predictor. Hence, the predictor looks up the stale value in the table and this mostly will cause incorrect value predictions. In this paper, a stride value predictor with the capability of speculative updates, which can update the prediction table speculatively without waiting until the instruction has been completed, is proposed. Also, the performance of the scheme is examined using Simplescalar simulator for SPECint95 benchmarks in which our value predictor is added.