Title :
Memory Prefetching Using Adaptive Stream Detection
Author :
Hur, Ibrahim ; Lin, Calvin
Abstract :
We present adaptive stream detection, a simple technique for modulating the aggressiveness of a stream prefetcher to match a workload´s observed spatial locality. We use this concept to design a prefetcher that resides on an on-chip memory controller. The result is a prefetcher with small hardware costs that can exploit workloads with low amounts of spatial locality. Using highly accurate simulators for the IBM Power5+, we show that this prefetcher improves performance of the SPEC2006fp benchmarks by an average of 32.7% when compared against a Power5+ that performs no prefetching. On a set of 5 commercial benchmarks that have low spatial locality, this prefetcher improves performance by an average of 15.1%. When compared against a typical Power5+ that does perform processor-side prefetching, the average performance improvement of these benchmark suites is 10.2% and 8.4%. We also evaluate the power and energy impact of our technique. For the same benchmark suites, DRAM power consumption increases by less than 3%, while energy usage decreases by 9.8% and 8.2%, respectively. Moreover, the power consumption of the prefetcher itself is low; it is estimated to increase the power consumption of the Power5+ chip by 0.06%
Keywords :
microcontrollers; multiprocessing systems; storage management chips; DRAM power consumption; adaptive stream detection; benchmarks; memory prefetching; on-chip memory controller; Costs; Delay; Energy consumption; Hardware; Histograms; Length measurement; Microarchitecture; Prefetching; Programmable control; Random access memory;
Conference_Titel :
Microarchitecture, 2006. MICRO-39. 39th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Orlando, FL
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2732-9
DOI :
10.1109/MICRO.2006.32