Data prefetching on the HP PA-8000

Abstract

Memory latency is a major issue for many modern microprocessor based systems, including the Hewlett-Packard PA-8000. Due to its fast clock rate and wide issue capability, cache misses in the PA-8000 are very expensive. The PA-8000 combines out-of-order execution with multiple outstanding memory requests to tolerate memory latency; however, this approach has its limitations. In order to substantially reduce much of the memory latency penalty, the PA-8000 uses software-based data cache prefetching. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of the data prefetch generation algorithm in the Hewlett-Packard Precision Architecture (HP-PA) compiler. We present performance results for SPECfp95 on a PA-8000 system that show speedups, due to data prefetching, of up to 100%.