Predictor virtualization: teaching old caches new tricks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To improve application performance, current processors rely on prediction-based hardware optimizations, such as data prefetching and branch prediction. These hardware optimizations store application metadata in on-chip predictor tables and use the metadata to anticipate and optimize for future application behavior. As application footprints grow, the predictor tables need to scale for predictors to remain effective. One important challenge in processor design is to decide which hardware optimizations to implement and how much resources to dedicate to a specific optimization. Traditionally, processor architects employ a one-size-fits-all approach when designing predictor-based hardware optimizations: for each optimization, a fixed portion of the on-chip resources is allocated to the predictor storage. This approach often leads to sub-optimal designs where: 1) resources are wasted for applications that do not benefit from a particular predictor or require only small predictor tables, or 2) predictors under-perform for applications that need larger predictor tables that can not be built due to area-latency-power constraints. This thesis introduces Predictor Virtualization (PV), a framework that uses the traditional processor memory hierarchy to store application metadata used in speculative hardware optimizations. This allows to emulate large, more accurate predictor tables, which, in return, leads to higher application performance. PV exploits the current trend of unprecedentedly large on-chip secondary caches and allocates on demand a small portion of the cache capacity to store application metadata used in hardware optimizations, adjusting to the application's need for predictor resources. As a consequence, PV is a pay-as-you-go technique that emulates large predictor tables without increasing the dedicated storage overhead. To demonstrate the benefits of virtualizing hardware predictors, we present virtualized designs for three different hardware optimizations: a state-of-the-art data prefetcher, conventional branch target buffers and an object-pointer prefetcher. While each of these hardware predictors exhibit different characteristics that lead to different virtualized designs, virtualization improves the cost-performance trade-off for all these optimizations. PV increases the utility of traditional processor caches: in addition to being accelerators for slow off-chip memories, on-chip caches are leveraged for increasing the effectiveness of predictor-based hardware optimizations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".