Replacement control for candidate producer-consumer relationships trained for prefetch generation

Abstract

Prefetch generation circuitry generates requests to prefetch data to a cache, where the prefetch generation circuitry is configured to initiate a producer prefetch to request return of producer data having a producer address and to initiate at least one consumer prefetch to request prefetching of consumer data to the cache, the consumer data having an address derived from the producer data returned in response to the producer prefetch. Training circuitry updates, based on executed load operations, a training table indicating candidate producer-consumer relationships being trained for use by the prefetch generation circuitry in generating the producer/consumer prefetches. Replacement control circuitry controls replacement of candidate producer-consumer relationships based on a producer-data-consumer-operand (PD-CO) match-based replacement policy criterion, which depends on whether a PD-CO match condition, indicative of the producer data for a producer load matching an address operand of a consumer load, is satisfied for existing/new candidate producer-consumer relationships.