Abstract for a Paper submitted to the 35th International Symposium on Microarchitecture

Microarchitectural Support for Precomputation Microthreads

Authors:

Robert S. Chappell
EECS Department
The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2122

Francis Tseng
ECE Department
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1084

Adi Yoaz
Texas Development Center
Intel Corporation
Austin, TX 78746

Yale N. Patt
ECE Department
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712-1084

Abstract:

Research has shown that precomputation microthreads can be useful for improving branch prediction and prefetching. However, it is not obvious how to provide the necessary microarchitectural support, and few details have been given in the literature. By judiciously constraining microthreads, we can easily adapt a superscalar machine to support many simultaneous microthreads. The nature of precomputation microthreads also requires efficient usage of resources. Our proposed implementation addresses this issue by dynamically identifying and aborting useless microthreads.

Web Site:

http://www.ece.utexas.edu/projects/hps