Low-cost, high-performance branch predictors for soft processors
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This work studies branch predictor implementations for general purpose, pipelined, single core soft processors. It shows that the existing designs do not map well onto reconfigurable hardware since they were optimized for custom logic implementation. This work then proposes an accurate and fast branch predictor that uses few resources on FPGAs. The proposed predictor uses: (1) an FPGA-friendly pattern based direction predictor, (2) a return address stack, (3) in-fetch target address calculation instead of a branch target buffer, and (4) instruction pre-decoding. Experimental measurements using a subset of the SPECCPU2006 workloads show that the presented FPGA-friendly branch predictor delivers high performance while operating at approximately 259 MHz using only 147 ALUTs and one BRAM on an Altera Stratix IV FPGA.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it