Correctly Implementing Value Prediction in Microprocessors that Support Multithreading or Multiprocessing

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Sorin, Daniel J
Cain, Harold W
Hill, Mark D
Lipasti, Mikko H
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This paper explores the interaction of value prediction with thread-level parallelism techniques, including multithreading and multiprocessing, where correctness is defined by a memory consistency model. Value prediction subtly interacts with the memory consistency model by allowing data dependent instructions to be reordered. We find that predicting a value and later verifying that the value eventually calculated is the same as the value predicted is not always sufficient. We present an example of a multithreaded pointer manipulation that can generate a surprising and erroneous result when value prediction is implemented without considering memory consistency correctness. We show that this problem can occur with real software, and we discuss how to apply existing techniques to eliminate the problem in both sequentially consistent systems and systems that obey relaxed memory consistency models.

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2001-12-01
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Departmental Papers (CIS)
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2023-05-17T00:29:51.000
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Copyright 2001 IEEE. Reprinted from Proceedings of the 34th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2001. MICRO-34, December 2001, pages 328-337. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of the University of Pennsylvania's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it. NOTE: At the time of publication, author Milo Martin was affiliated with the University of Wisconsin. Currently (March 2007), he is a faculty member in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
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