A study of the effects of compiler-controlled speculation on instruction and data caches

Compiler-controlled speculation has been shown to be effective in increasing instruction level parullelism (ILP) found in non-numeric programs. However, it is not clear the extent to which speculatively scheduled code may affect the instruction and data caches. In particular, the amount of time spent resolving cache mis.qes may be significant enough to prevent the more aggressitle speculation models from attaining their best potentialperformance results. The objective of this paper is to quantify these effects using aggressive zpeculntion models. Index terms instruction cache effects, data cache effects, compiler-controlled speculation, safe speculation, VLIW, superscalar