A Specialized BTB Organization for Servers
Chapter
Accepted version
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3055448Utgivelsesdato
2022Metadata
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Originalversjon
10.1145/3559009.3569692Sammendrag
Contemporary server applications feature massive instruction footprints stemming from deeply layered software stacks. These footprints far exceed the capacity of the branch target buffer (BTB) and instruction cache (L1-I), resulting in the so-called front-end bottleneck. BTB misses may lead to wrong-path execution, triggering a pipeline flush when misspeculation is detected. Such pipeline flushes not only throw away tens of cycles of work but also expose the fill latency of the pipeline. Similarly, L1-I misses cause the core front-end to stall for tens of cycles while the miss is being served from lower-level caches.