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39th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'06)
DMDC: Delayed Memory Dependence Checking through Age-Based Filtering
Orlando, Florida, USA
December 09-December 13
ISBN: 0-7695-2732-9
Fernando Castro, University Complutense of Madrid
Luis Pinuel, University Complutense of Madrid
Daniel Chaver, University Complutense of Madrid
Manuel Prieto, University Complutense of Madrid
Michael Huang, University of Rochester
Francisco Tirado, University Complutense of Madrid
One of the main challenges of modern processor design is the implementation of a scalable and efficient mechanism to detect memory access order violations as a result of out-of-order execution of memory instructions. Traditional CAM-based associative queues can be very slow and energy hungry. In this paper we introduce two new management schemes. The first one is a filtering scheme based on simple age-tracking. This scheme can easily avoid 95-98% of associative load queue (LQ) searches using only a few registers. This translates into significant power savings. More importantly, however, this filtering makes our second scheme, Delayed Memory Dependence Checking (DMDC), practical. With a small hash table, DMDC completely avoids the need for an associative LQ and relies on indexing-based checking at the commit phase and hence cuts the energy spent on LQ by an average of 95%. At an average of about 0.3%, the performance impact is negligible. When the energy cost of the increased execution time is factored in, the processor still makes net energy savings of about 3-8%, depending on the configuration and the applications.
Citation:
Fernando Castro, Luis Pinuel, Daniel Chaver, Manuel Prieto, Michael Huang, Francisco Tirado, "DMDC: Delayed Memory Dependence Checking through Age-Based Filtering," micro, pp.297-308, 39th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'06), 2006
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