Path-based next N trace prefetch in trace processors

Addressing to the high capacity miss rate, a two-level trace cache is incorporated with conventional one-level trace cache in this paper. We found that augmenting two-level trace cache can only improve performance in a limited way for the long access latency of two-level trace cache. In order to reduce the access latency of two-level trace cache, a path-based next N trace prefetch mechanism is proposed in this paper. Path-based next N trace prefetch mechanism prefetches the next N trace from current running trace with the help of path-based next N trace prediction which is an extension to the path-based next trace predictor. Simulation results show that the path-based next N trace prefetch mechanism with prefetch distance three attains 11.3% performance improvement over the conventional one-level trace cache mechanism for eight SPECint95 benchmarks.