Improving single-thread performance with fine-grain state maintenance

ABSTRACT

We show that a multi-threaded processor that is aware of the processor state in a fine-grain manner can improve single-thread performance significantly by assigning the task of maintaining the correct processor state to an independent thread. We develop fine-grain state maintenance techniques that can be applied in multi-threaded environments and present a fine-grain state application of runahead execution where the data values dependent on a missed load are treated as damaged values. These values are verified and recovered as necessary by an independent thread. We evaluate an SMT-like fine grain state processor and show that it obtains an average of 38.9% and up to 160.0% better performance than coarse-grain baseline processors on the SPEC CFP2000 benchmark suite.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.2 Multiple Data Stream Architectures (Multiprocessors)

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.1 Single Data Stream Architectures

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
checkpoint, processor state, recovery, runahead, simultaneous multi-threading