Intel Corporation

Jesus Sanchez

Antonio Gonzalez

Pedro Marcuello

Carlos Madriles

Carlos Garcia

Peter Rundberg

Carlos García Quiñones

According to one example embodiment of the inventive subject matter, the method and apparatus described herein is used to generate an optimized speculative version of a static piece of code. The portion of code is optimized in the sense that the number of instructions executed will be smaller. However, since the applied optimization is speculative, the optimized version can be incorrect and some mechanism to recover from that situation is required. Thus, the quality of the produced code will be measured by taking into account both the final length of the code as well as the frequency of misspeculation.

Branch pruning in architectures with speculation support

Disclosed are selected embodiments of a processor that may include a plurality of thread units and a register file architecture to support speculative multithreading. For at least one embodiment, live-in values for a speculative thread are computed via execution of a precomputation slice and are stored in a validation buffer for later validation. A global register file holds the committed architecture state generated by a non-speculative thread. Each thread unit includes a local register file. A directory indicates, for each architectural register, which speculative thread(s) have generated a value for the architectural register. Other embodiments are also described and claimed.

Multi-version register file for multithreading processors with live-in precomputation

A method for analyzing a set of spawning pairs, where each spawning pair identifies at least one speculative thread. The analysis may be practiced via software in a compiler, binary optimizer, standalone modeler, or the like. The analysis may include determining a predicted execution time for a sequence of program instructions, given the set of spawning pairs, for a target processor having a known number of thread units, where the target processor supports speculative multithreading. The method is further to select a spawning pair, according to a greedy approach, if the spawning pair provides a performance enhancement, in terms of decreased execution time due to increased parallelism, when the speculative thread is spawned during execution of a code sequence. Other embodiments are also described and claimed.

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Barcelona, Spain

Jesus Sanchez