Abstract:

This article presents an experimental and analytical study of value prediction and its impact on speculative execution in superscalar microprocessors. Value prediction is a new paradigm that suggests predicting outcome values of operations (at run-time ) and using these predicted values to trigger the execution of true-data-dependent operations speculatively. As a result, stals to memory locations can be reduced and the amount of instruction-level parallelism can be extended beyond the limits of the program's dataflow graph. This article examines the characteristics of the value prediction concept from two perspectives: (1) the related phenomena that are reflected in the nature of computer programs and (2) the significance of these phenomena to boosting instruction-level parallelism of superscalar microprocessors that support speculative execution. In order to better understand these characteristics, our work combines both analytical and experimental studies.