Asymmetric Prefetching Architecture for Multicore Processor

Abstract

Prefetching is one of the main techniques for improving the performance of modern processors. Various prefetch algorithms have been proposed targeting various applications and memory access patterns. Modern SoCs are mainly equipped with multicore processors, and various processes are operated separately by each core. This implies that for each core, different prefetcher may work better. In this paper, we propose a hardware prefetcher that integrates three prefetching algorithms and statically allocates a prefetching algorithm that provides better performance to each workload in a multicore processor. We observe 4.6% overall performance improvement compared to using a single prefetcher and reduce buffer resources by 41%.