Conference paper
A Time-predictable Branch Predictor
Long pipelines need good branch predictors to keep the pipeline running. Current branch predictors are optimized for the average case, which might not be a good fit for real-time systems and worst-case execution time analysis. This paper presents a time-predictable branch predictor co-designed with the associated worst-case execution time analysis.
The branch predictor uses a fully-associative cache to track branch outcomes and destination addresses. The fully-associative cache avoids any false sharing of entries between branches. Therefore, we can analyze program scopes that contain a number of branches lower than or equal to the number of branches in the prediction table.
Experimental results show that the worst-case execution time bounds of programs using the proposed predictor are lower than using static branch predictors at a moderate hardware cost.
Language: | English |
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Publisher: | Association for Computing Machinery |
Year: | 2019 |
Pages: | 607-616 |
Proceedings: | 34th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing |
ISBN: | 1450359337 and 9781450359337 |
Types: | Conference paper |
DOI: | 10.1145/3297280.3297337 |
ORCIDs: | Schoeberl, Martin |