Abstract:

The technique of hardwarebased data prefetching can improve microprocessors’ memory access performance efficiently. Implementation of this technique is urgently needed in Shenwei microprocessors to boost their performance, but it faces the restrictions from hardware cost and architectural characteristics. Based on existing research achievements and current industrial applications of prefetching technique, we propose a hardwarebased data prefetcher implementation framework, which is highly coalescent with Shenwei microprocessors’ architectural characteristics. Take the stream prefetcher as an example, the hardware data prefetching technique can improve integer performance of Shenwei microprocessors by 5.17% on average, 28.88% at most; and improve float performance by 6.39% on average, 30.11% at most, while the chip area is only increased by 0.97%.

Key words: hardware prefetching;shenwei microprocessors;memory access;stream prefetcher