M. Co, D. A.B. Weikle, and K. Skadron.
University of Virginia, Department of Computer Science Technical Report No. CS-2005-19
Abstract
Experiments to determine the potential for program-level
and/or phase-level adaptation of the branch predictor
configuration for the purpose of total processor
energy savings were performed.
The performance and energy-efficiency of an 8-wide issue,
out-of-order processor with six different branch predictors were
evaluated on the SPECcpu2000 benchmark suite.
Each branch predictor was compared to the
branch predictor with the highest overall average IPC.
The comparison was performed at both the program-level
and at 1M instruction intervals
to determine the potential of adaptation of the branch predictor configuration
to improve overall processor energy-efficiency.
The results of these experiments indicate little potential for branch predictor adaptation for the SPECcpu2000 benchmark suite using the branch predictors evaluated.
Additional results show that the piecewise linear branch predictor
consumes significantly more energy than its close-performing competitors
and that the hashed perceptron predictor is comparable both in performance
and energy-efficiency to the overall best-performing branch predictor
in this study, O-GEHL.