Design of a Hybrid Data Value Predictor with Dynamic Classification Capability in Superscalar Processors

To achieve high performance by exploiting instruction level parallelism aggressively in superscalar processors, it is necessary to overcome the limitation imposed by control dependences and data dependences which prevent instructions from executing parallel. Value prediction is a technique that breaks data dependences by predicting the outcome of an instruction and executes speculatively its data dependent instruction based on the predicted outcome. In this paper, a hybrid value prediction scheme with dynamic classification mechanism is proposed. We design a hybrid predictor by combining the last predictor, a stride predictor and a two-level predictor. The choice of a predictor for each instruction is determined by a dynamic classification mechanism. This makes each predictor utilized more efficiently than the hybrid predictor without dynamic classification mechanism. To show performance improvements of our scheme, we simulate the SPECint95 benchmark set by using execution-driven simulator. The results show that our scheme effect reduce of 45% hardware cost and 16% prediction accuracy improvements comparing with the conventional hybrid prediction scheme and two-level value prediction scheme.