Agner`s CPU blog

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Jump prefetch?
Author: Agner Date: 2017-01-31 01:40
csdt wrote:
The 3 instructions are:
- set_jmp target
- set_jmp cond target0 target1 (set target to "target0" if "cond" is 0 and to "target1" otherwise)
- jmp2target

Here is a simple loop:

(prolog)
loop:
%r01 = sub.i32 %r01 1
set_jmp %r01 loop_end loop
(loop body)
jmp2target
loop_end:
(epilog)

So basically, the jump is always taken, and you know exactly the address of the jump in advance.

OK. Now I think I understand you.

Your idea is somewhat like an extension to a "delay slot". Some old RISC architectures (MIPS, SPARC, OpenRisc) have a delay slot of one or two instructions after a jump. The instructions in the delay slot are executed before the jump is executed. The main problem with these delay slots is that they are optimized for a particular hardware implementation. A new implementation with a longer pipeline and more parallelism will need a longer delay slot.

This makes me wonder if it would be useful to have a variable-length delay slot. A branch instruction could have an 8-bit field indicating a delay slot of 0-255 instruction words. The compiler will place the delayed branch instruction as early in the code as it can. The instruction fetcher in the CPU will then know in advance what to fetch after the branching point. If the fetcher has already fetched past the branching point at the time the delayed branch is executed then it has to discard the extra instructions and fetch again. This will give a bubble in the pipeline, but this bubble will be smaller the longer the delay slot is.

There are known problems with delay slots: Interrupts, debug breakpoints, and jumps in the delay slot lead to extra complications.

We might overcome these problems by making the delayed jump instruction a "prediction hint" to be confirmed later by a regular branch instruction at the actual branching point. Only in the rare case that the prediction hint is lost or compromized due to interrupts or whatever will we have a misprediction at the branch point.

The delay slot has to be quite long. Modern microprocessors can execute 3 or 4 instructions per clock cycle and have a pipeline of 10-20 stages. With 3 instructions per clock on average and a 10-stage pipeline we would need 30 instructions to fill the delay slot. If no other jump instructions are allowed in the delay slot then we would rarely be able to make a sufficiently long delay slot.

Now, back to your proposal. I understand that you want to have a separate register for jump targets only. We would have to set this jump target register some 30 instructions in advance in order to keep the pipeline full. I think it is unlikely that we have no other branch instructions in this 30 instruction space, so we need more than one jump target register. If we need many jump target registers, then we might as well use the general purpose registers for jump targets instead. So, now your set-jump-target instruction just becomes ordinary instructions that calculate a jump target and put it into a register. And your jump-to-target instruction becomes a register-indirect jump. Now the problem becomes how to make the register value available to the branch prediction front end of a superscalar processor. The instructions that set the jump target are executed in the out-of-order back end, while the branch predictor operates in the in-order front end.

This makes me think, is it possible to execute simple instructions already in the in-order front end of a superscalar processor? If we can execute the instructions that calculate the jump target already in the in-order front end, then we have reduced the necessary delay to a few clock cycles. I am imagining a dual execution system: We have a system of in-order ALUs and out-of-order ALUs. Simple instructions are executed in the in-order ALUs if the operands are available already while the instruction is decoded in the in-order front ind. If the operands are not available yet, then the instruction is passed on to the out-of-order back end.

Here, we need a system to track all the general purpose registers to see if they are ready. We can have a "register cache" in the in-order front end. Every time the decoder sees an instruction that writes to a register, it will mark the entry for this register as dirty and remember which instruction it was. When this instruction is later executed (in order or out of order) the value is written to the register cache and marked as clean (unless another instruction writing to the same register has been encountered in the meantime). Simple instructions can execute in the in-order system if all their input operands are ready. The result is stored both in the register cache and passed on to the register renamer/allocater.

Branch instructions, jumps, calls, etc. should execute in the in-order front end. The compiler should make sure that any registers that the branch depends on are calculated as early as possible, and preferably using simple instructions that can execute in the in-order front end. If a branch depends on a memory operand, such as a jump table or table of function pointers, then the compiler should load the memory operand into a register as early as possible and then make a register-indirect jump.

A simple loop with a loop counter could benefit from this. The increment and compare instructions for the loop counter will be simple instructions that are likely to execute in the in-order front end so that the values are available early.

Multiway branches are particularly difficult to predict, and they could benefit from a system that calculates the target address in advance. For example, a byte code interpreter typically loads one byte at a time and uses this code as index into a multiway jump table. The software can easily read the next byte code in advance, fetch the target from the jump table and store it in a register.

This is an interesting discussion. The software may be able to calculate branch targets early in many cases, but the intricacies of out-of-order execution makes it complicated to forward this information to the in-order front end. Whatever solution we may come up with might be complicated, but still use less silicon space then the complicated branch prediction mechanisms that are used in modern microprocessors today.

 
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