Software-based and Hardware-based Branch Prediction Strategies
and Performance Evaluation
Gang Luo
gang@cs.wisc.edu
Hongfei Guo guo@cs.wisc.edu
Abstract:
In a highly parallel computer system, performance losses due to
conditional branch instructions can be minimized by branch prediction
to fetch and issue subsequent instructions before the actual branch
outcome is known. This paper discusses several software-based static
and hardware-based dynamic branch prediction strategies and uses the
modified release 3.0 of the SimpleScalar simulation tool set to
evaluate their performance. According to our test result, the
hardware-based dynamic branch prediction strategies always achieve high
prediction accuracy than the software-based static branch prediction
strategies.