An L1 Cache Prefetching Scheme using Excessively Aggressive Prefetchering and a Small Direct-mapped Filtering Cache

This paper proposes an L1 cache prefetch scheme using an excessively aggressive hardware prefetcher and a hardware prefetch filter having a small direct-mapped filtering cache. A quantitative analysis method has been introduced and applied to analyze nonideal effects of aggressive cache prefetching. From those analysis results, the structure and algorithm of a prefetch filter has been derived and simulated, and the overall system performance has been measured using a cycle-by-cycle cache simulator. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the overall system performance by 18% on the average over several benchmarks