Wormhole: Wisely Predicting Multidimensional Branches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Improving branch prediction accuracy is essential in enabling high-performance processors to find more concurrency and to improve energy efficiency by reducing wrong path instruction execution, a paramount concern in today's power-constrained computing landscape. Branch prediction traditionally considers past branch outcomes as a linear, continuous bit stream through which it searches for patterns and correlations. The state-of-the-art TAGE predictor and its variants follow this approach while varying the length of the global history fragments they consider. This work identifies a construct, inherent to several applications that challenges existing, linear history based branch prediction strategies. It finds that applications have branches that exhibit multi-dimensional correlations. These are branches with the following two attributes: 1) they are enclosed within nested loops, and 2) they exhibit correlation across iterations of the outer loops. Folding the branch history and interpreting it as a multidimensional piece of information, exposes these cross-iteration correlations allowing predictors to search for more complex correlations in the history space with lower cost. We present wormhole, a new side-predictor that exploits these multidimensional histories. Wormhole is integrated alongside ISL-TAGE and leverages information from its existing side-predictors. Experiments show that the wormhole predictor improves accuracy more than existing side-predictors, some of which are commercially available, with a similar hardware cost. Considering 40 diverse application traces, the wormhole predictor reduces MPKI by an average of 2.53% and 3.15% on top of 4KB and 32KB ISL-TAGE predictors respectively. When considering the top four workloads that exhibit multi-dimensional history correlations, Wormhole achieves 22% and 20% MPKI average reductions over 4KB and 32KB ISL-TAGE.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".