Analytical Models of Instruction Fetch on Superscalar Processors

초록

This research presents an analytical model to predict the instruction fetch rate on superscalar processors. The proposed model is also able to analyze the performance relationship between cache miss and branch prediction miss. The proposed model takes into account various kind of architectural parameters such as branch instruction probability, cache miss rate, branch prediction miss rate, and etc.. To prove the correctness of the proposed model, we performed extensive simulations and compared the results with those of the analytical models. Simulation results showed that the pro- posed model can estimate the instruction fetch rate accurately within 10% error in most cases. The model is also able to show the effects of the cache miss and branch prediction miss on the performance of instruction fetch rate, which can provide an valuable information in designing a balanced system.