Title
Exploiting dead value information
Abstract
We describe Dead Value Information (DVI) and introduce three new optimizations which exploit it. DVI provides assertions that certain register values are dead, meaning they will not be read before being overwritten. The processor can use DVI to track dead registers and dynamically eliminate unnecessary save and restore instructions from the execution stream at procedure calls and context switches. Our results indicate that dynamic saves and restore instances can be reduced by 46% for procedure calls and by 51% for context switches. In addition, save/restore elimination for procedure calls can improve overall performance by up to 5%. DVI also allows the processor manage physical registers to efficiently, reducing the size requirements of the physical register file. When the system clock rate is proportional to the register file cycle time, this optimization can improve performance. All of these optimizations can be supported with only a few new instructions and minimal additional hardware structures.
Year
DOI
Venue
1997
10.1109/MICRO.1997.645804
MICRO
Keywords
Field
DocType
processor architecture,registers,simultaneous multithreading,performance,switches,compiler optimizations,cache size,loop tiling,remote procedure calls,hardware,cycle time,scheduling,context switches,parallel programming,register file,instruction sets
Remote procedure call,CPU cache,Computer science,Instruction set,Parallel computing,Register file,Optimizing compiler,Real-time computing,System time,Microarchitecture,Context switch
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1072-4451
0-8186-7977-8
50
PageRank 
References 
Authors
2.94
4
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Milo M. K. Martin12677125.22
Amir Roth275741.65
Charles N. Fischer345575.55