Article View: alt.folklore.computers
Article #5286Broken instruction pre-fetch hueristics on the 7030?
From: cos... Bernie Cosell
Date: Tue, 09 Oct 1990 14:08
Date: Tue, 09 Oct 1990 14:08
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1488 bytes
Perhaps this is the place to get a bit of myth/rumor I picked up years and years ago straightened out. What i heard was that in an attempt to get the 7030 to go as fast as possible, IBM gave it the first (?) instruction lookahead/prefetch logic. Not only did they prefetch the next instruction on 'ordinary' instructions, but they also prefetched across GOTOs. The tricky part, as I heard it, was that for _conditional_ transfers, they put in a fair pile of heuristics to try to *guess* which branch a conditional would take. The rumor basically asserted that they got the heuristics almost always wrong [like 70+% of the time], and so when it came time to make a similar lookahead box for the 360, they just used the SAME heuristics, but simply reversed the 'which branch' decision... and presto: went from being WRONG 70% of the time to being RIGHT 70% of the time. Is any of this grounded in reality? /Bernie\
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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!decwrl!apple!bbn.com!cosell From: cos...@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Broken instruction pre-fetch hueristics on the 7030? Message-ID: <59884@bbn.BBN.COM> Date: 9 Oct 90 14:08:04 GMT Sender: ne...@bbn.com Reply-To: cos...@BBN.COM (Bernie Cosell) Distribution: alt Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies, Inc, Cambridge MA Lines: 20 Posted: Tue Oct 9 15:08:04 1990 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit