A Hybrid Value Predictor using Speculative Update in Superscalar Processors

To improve the performance of wide-issue Superscalar microprocessors, it is essential to increase the width of instruction fetch and issue rate. Data dependences are major hurdle to exploit ILP(Instruction-Level Parallelism) efficiently, so several related works have suggested that the limits imposed by data dependences can be overcome to some extent with the use of the data value prediction. But the suggested mechanisms may access the same value prediction table entry again before they have been updated with a real data value. They will cause incorrect value prediction by using stable data and incur misprediction penalty and lowering performance. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid value predictor which achieve high performance by reducing stale data. Because the proposed hybrid value predictor can update the prediction table speculatively, it efficiently reduces the number of mispredicted instruction due to stable due to stale data. For SPECint95 benchmark programs on the 16-issue superscalar processors, simulation results show that the average prediction accuracy increase from 59% for non-speculative update to 72% for speculative update.