Branch Strategies: Modeling and Optimization

Instruction dependency introduced by conditional branch instructions, which is resolved only at run-time, can have severe performance impact on pipelined machines. A variety of strategies are in wide use to minimize this impact. Additional instruction-traffic generated by these branch-strategies can also have an adverse effect on the system performance. Therefore, in addition to the likely reduction a branch prediction strategy offers in average branch delay, resulting excess i-traffic can be an important parameter in evaluating its overall effectiveness. The Objective of this paper is two-fold : to develop a model for different approaches to the branch problem and to help select an optimal strategy after taking into account the additional i-traffic generated by the i-buffering. The model presented provides a flexible tool for comparing different branch strategies in terms of the reduction it offers in average branch delay and also in terms of the associated cost of wasted instruction fetches. This additional criterion turns out to be a valuable consideration in choosing between two almost equally performing strategies. More importantly, it provides a better insight into the expected overall system performance. Simple compiler-support-based low implementationcost strategies can be very effective under certain conditions. An active branch prediction scheme based on loop-buffer can be as competitive as a branch-targetbuffer based strategy.