Effective Context-Sensitive Memory Dependence Prediction

Memory dependence prediction is a fundamental technique to increase instruction-and memory-level parallelism in out-of-order processors, which are crucial for high performance. However, over the years, the performance gap of state-of-the-art memory dependence predictors with respect to an ideal predictor has grown due to the increase of the pipeline width, reaching up to 6% for modern architectures. State-of-the-art predictors brace context sensitivity, however, not-well-adjusted history lengths lead to loss of accuracy and high storage requirements.

This work proposes PHAST, a novel context-sensitive memory dependence predictor that identifies for each load the minimum history length necessary to provide precise predictions. Our key observation is that for each load, it suffices to identify the youngest conflicting store and the path between them. This observation is proven empirically using an unlimited budget version of PHAST, which performs close to an ideal predictor with a 0.47% gap.

Through cycle-accurate simulation of the SPEC CPU 2017 suite, we show that a 14.5KB implementation of PHAST falls 1.50% behind an ideal predictor. Compared to the top-performing state-of-the-art predictors, PHAST achieves average speedups of 5.05% (up to 39.7%), 1.29% (up to 22.0%), and 3.04% (up to 38.2%) with respect to an 18.5KB StoreSets, a 19KB NoSQ, and a 38.6 MDP-TAGE, respectively. This stems from a considerable misprediction reduction, ranging between 62.5% and 70.0%, on average.