The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Mar. 30, 2010
Filed:
Apr. 06, 2007
Francis Patrick O'connell, Austin, TX (US);
Jeffrey A. Stuecheli, Austin, TX (US);
Francis Patrick O'Connell, Austin, TX (US);
Jeffrey A. Stuecheli, Austin, TX (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A system and method for improving the page crossing performance of a data prefetcher is presented. A prefetch engine tracks times at which a data stream terminates due to a page boundary. When a certain percentage of data streams terminate at page boundaries, the prefetch engine sets an aggressive profile flag. In turn, when the data prefetch engine receives a real address that corresponds to the beginning/end of a new page, and the aggressive profile flag is set, the prefetch engine uses an aggressive startup profile to generate and schedule prefetches on the assumption that the real address is highly likely to be the continuation of a long data stream. As a result, the system and method minimize latency when crossing real page boundaries when a program is predominately accessing long streams.