Silent stores for free
- 1 December 2000
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Abstract
Silent store instructions write values that exactly match the values that are already stored at the memory address that is being written. A recent study reveals that significant benefits can be gained by detecting and removing such stores from a program's execution. This paper studies the problem of detecting silent stores and shows that an average of 31% and 50% of silent stores can be detected for very low implemen- tation cost, by exploiting temporal and spatial locality in a processor's load and store queues. We also show that over 83% of all silent stores can be detected using idle cache read access ports. Furthermore, we show that processors that use standard error-correction codes to protect data caches from transient errors can be modified only slightly to detect 100% of silent stores that hit in the cache. Finally, we show that silent store detection via these methods can result in a 11% harmonic mean performance improvement in a two-level store-through on-chip cache hierarchy that is based on a real microprocessor design.Keywords
This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit:
- On the value locality of store instructionsPublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,2000
- The Mips R10000 superscalar microprocessorIEEE Micro, 1996
- IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978–1994)IBM Journal of Research and Development, 1996
- Terrestrial cosmic raysIBM Journal of Research and Development, 1996
- Cache write policies and performancePublished by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1993