What is indirect branch prediction?

Indirect branch prediction is a performance limiting factor for current computer systems, preventing superscalar processors from exploiting the available ILP. Indirect branches are responsible for 55.7% of mispredictions in our benchmark set, although they only stand for 15.5% of dynamic branches.

What if branch prediction is wrong?

Once the branch is decided, if the prediction was correct nothing happens but if the prediction was wrong, the pipeline simply switches to processing the correct instruction at the next clock.

What will be the penalty if branch predictor predicts wrong result?

When the prediction is right, that is, when the branch is not taken, there is no penalty to be paid. On the other hand, when the prediction is wrong, one bubble is created and the next instruction is fetched from the target address.

What is indirect jump instruction?

An indirect jump is when your program asks the CPU to transfer control to a location that your code itself computes: “jmp %register”. Compare to a direct jump, where the destination of the jump is hardcoded into the jump instruction itself: “jmp $0x100”. Most programs have indirect jumps somewhere.

How do you optimize a branch prediction?

One thing you can do in a high-level language is to eliminate branches by expressing the problem in terms of lookups or arithmetic. This helps branch prediction work better on the remaining branches, because there’s more “history” available. I’ve made huge performance improvements to bottleneck code with this approach.

How many cycles does branch prediction take?

On modern processors it takes between one and twenty CPU cycles. There are at least four categories of control flow instructions: unconditional branch (jmp on x86), call/return, conditional branch (e.g. je on x86) taken and conditional branch not taken.

What is the difference between direct and indirect jumps?

In direct jump, the target address (i.e. its relative offset value) is encoded into the jump instruction itself. However, in an indirect jump, the target address is specified indirectly either through memory or a general-purpose register.

What are direct and indirect branches?

Direct branch (DB) is an instruction which explicitly includes the jump destination address (in full, or as an offset from a register) in the body of the instruction. An indirect branch (IB) is an instruction that includes a pointer to a memory address, which in turn contains the jump destination address.

What do branch predictors predict?

Branch prediction attempts to guess whether a conditional jump will be taken or not. Branch target prediction attempts to guess the target of a taken conditional or unconditional jump before it is computed by decoding and executing the instruction itself.

How does branch target buffer improve performance?

Abstract. A branch target buffer (BTB) can reduce the performance penalty of branches in pipelined processors by predicting the path of the branch and caching information used by the branch.

How much faster is branchless programming?

So, the branchless version is almost twice as fast as the branching version on my system (3.4 GHz. Intel Core i7).

What is indirect jump instructions?

An indirect jump is when your program asks the CPU to transfer control to a location that your code itself computes: “jmp %register”. Compare to a direct jump, where the destination of the jump is hardcoded into the jump instruction itself: “jmp $0x100”.

Why do we use indirect addressing?

Quick Reference One use of indirect addressing is to supply a way of circumventing short address field limitations since the first memory reference provides a full word of address size. Another use is as a pointer to a table.

What is the difference between direct and indirect addressing?

The direct addressing mode contains the concerned operand in the instruction code’s address field. In the case of an indirect addressing mode, the operand’s address stays in the address field of any instruction. It requires no memory references for accessing the data.

Is it possible to implement a neural branch predictor in Intel processors?

Intel already implements this idea in one of the IA-64 ‘s simulators (2003). The AMD Ryzen multi-core processor’s Infinity Fabric and the Samsung Exynos processor include a perceptron-based neural branch predictor.

How accurate is the Intel Pentium’s local branch predictor?

The Intel Pentium MMX, Pentium II, and Pentium III have local branch predictors with a local 4-bit history and a local pattern history table with 16 entries for each conditional jump. On the SPEC ’89 benchmarks, very large local predictors saturate at 97.1% correct. : 6

Can we improve branch predictors?

Abstract Improvement of branch predictors has been one of the focal points of computer architecture research during the last decade, ranging from two-level predictors to complex hybrid mechanisms. Most research efforts try to use real, already implemented, branch predictor sizes and organizations for comparison and evaluation.

What is indirect branch predictor barrier (IbpB)?

The indirect branch predictor barrier (IBPB) is an indirect branch control mechanism that establishes a barrier, preventing software that executed before the barrier from controlling the predicted targets of indirect branches executed after the barrier on the same logical processor. A processor supports IBPB if it enumerates CPUID.