Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The branch predictor may, for example, recognize that the conditional jump is taken more often than not, or that it is taken every second time. Branch prediction is not the same as branch target prediction. Branch prediction attempts to guess whether a conditional jump will be taken or not.
Elimination of unnecessary branch instructions can make the execution of necessary branches, such as those that make up loops, faster by lessening the load on branch prediction mechanisms. Elimination of the cost of a branch misprediction which can be high on deeply pipelined architectures.
An example of a simple hardware branch prediction scheme is to assume that all backward branches (i.e. to a smaller program counter) are taken (because they are part of a loop), and all forward branches (to a larger program counter) are not taken (because they leave a loop).
This approach is employed in a variety of areas, including branch prediction in pipelined processors, value prediction for exploiting value locality, prefetching memory and files, and optimistic concurrency control in database systems. [1] [2] [3] Speculative multithreading is a special case of speculative execution.
In particular, Spectre centers on branch prediction, which is a special case of speculative execution. Unlike the related Meltdown vulnerability disclosed at the same time, Spectre does not rely on a specific feature of a single processor's memory management and protection system, but is instead a more generalized idea.
Branch target prediction is not the same as branch prediction, which guesses whether a conditional branch will be taken or not-taken in a binary manner. In more parallel processor designs, as the instruction cache latency grows longer and the fetch width grows wider, branch target extraction becomes a bottleneck. The recurrence is:
In computer architecture, a delay slot is an instruction slot being executed without the effects of a preceding instruction. [1] The most common form is a single arbitrary instruction located immediately after a branch instruction on a RISC or DSP architecture; this instruction will execute even if the preceding branch is taken.
Superscalar, branch prediction PowerPC e500: Dual 7 stage Multi-core PowerPC e600: 3-issue 7 stage Superscalar out-of-order execution, branch prediction PowerPC e5500: 2010 4-issue 7 stage Out-of-order, multi-core PowerPC e6500: 2012 Multi-core PowerPC 603: 4 5 execution units, branch prediction, no SMP PowerPC 603q: 1996 5 In-order PowerPC 604 ...