Performance of a stride-based prefetcher on an out-of-order processing unit (cpu)

Abstract

Systems, apparatusses, and methods are disclosed for improving performance of a stride-based prefetcher on an out-of-order central processing unit (CPU). The present disclosure teaches a processor system that employs out-of-order stride prefetch units. The out-of-order stride prefetch units are utilized for issuing prefetches for out-of-order stride access patterns. In one or more embodiments, the out-of-order stride prefetch units examine the offsets between past virtual address (VA) accesses and the directions of the past VA accesses in order to generate an estimate of the underlying VA access stride of the executed program code (PC). In at least one embodiment, the out-of-order stride prefetch units use the estimate of the VA access stride in order to generate a prediction of future VA accesses. In some embodiments, after the out-of-order stride prefetch units have generated the prediction of future VA accesses, the out-of-order stride prefetch units prefetch the predicted future VA accesses.