Improving single-thread performance with fine-grain state maintenance

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

12-1-2008

Abstract

We show that a multi-threaded processor that is aware of the processor state in a fine-grain manner can improve singlethread performance significantly by assigning the task of maintaining the correct processor state to an independent thread. We develop fine-grain state maintenance techniques that can be applied in multi-threaded environments and present a fine-grain state application of runahead execution where the data values dependent on a missed load are treated as damaged values. These values are verified and recovered as necessary by an independent thread. We evaluate an SMT-like fine grain state processor and show that it obtains an average of 38.9% and up to f 60.0% better performance than coarse-grain baseline processors on the SPEC CFP2000 benchmark suite. Copyright 2008 ACM.

Publication Title

Conference on Computing Frontiers - Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Computing Frontiers, CF'08

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