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Dataflow Predication
Orlando, Florida, USA December 09-December 13
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MICRO.2006.1739th Annual IEEE/ACM International Sy ...
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Aaron Smith, University of Texas at Austin
Ramadass Nagarajan, University of Texas at Austin
Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, University of Texas at Austin
Robert McDonald, University of Texas at Austin
Doug Burger, University of Texas at Austin
Stephen W. Keckler, University of Texas at Austin
Kathryn S. McKinley, University of Texas at Austin
Predication facilitates high-bandwidth fetch and large static scheduling regions, but has typically been too complex to implement comprehensively in out-of-ordermicroarchitectures. This paper describes dataflow predication, which provides per-instruction predication in a dataflow ISA, low predication computation overheads similar to VLIW ISAs, and low complexity out-of-order issue. A twobit field in each instruction specifies whether an instruction is predicated, in which case, an arriving predicate token determines whether an instruction should execute. Dataflow predication incorporates three features that reduce predication overheads. First, dataflow predicate computation permits computation of compound predicates with virtually no overhead instructions. Second, early mispredication termination squashes in-flight instructions with false predicates at any time, eliminating the overhead of falsely predicated paths. Finally, implicit predication mitigates the fanout overhead of dataflow predicates by reducing the number of explicitly predicated instructions, by predicating only the heads of dependence chains. Dataflow predication also exposes new compiler optimizations?such as disjoint instruction merging and path-sensitive predicate removal?for increased performance of predicated code in an out-of-order design.
Citation:
Aaron Smith, Ramadass Nagarajan, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, Robert McDonald, Doug Burger, Stephen W. Keckler, Kathryn S. McKinley, "Dataflow Predication," micro, pp.89-102, 39th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO'06), 2006
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