Title
Increasing Processor Performance Through Early Register Release
Abstract
Modern superscalar microprocessors need sizable register files to support large number of in-flight instructions for exploiting ILP. An alternative to building large register files is to use smaller number of registers, but manage them more effectively. More efficient management of registers can also result in higher performance if the reduction of the register file size is not the goal. Traditional register file management mechanisms deallocate a physical register only when the next instruction with the same destination architectural register commits. We propose two complementary techniques for deallocating the register immediately after the instruction producing the register's value commits itself, without waiting for the commitment of the next instruction with the same destination. Our design relies on the use of a checkpointed register file (CRF), where a local shadow copy of each bitcell is used to temporarily save the early deallocated register values should they be needed to recover from branch mispredictions or to reconstruct the precise state after exceptions or interrupts. The proposed techniques outperform the previously proposed schemes for early deallocation of registers. For the register-constrained datapath configurations, our techniques result in up to 35% performance increase with 23.3% increase on the average across SPEC2000 benchmarks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1109/ICCD.2004.1347965
ICCD
Keywords
Field
DocType
early register release,large register file,next instruction,processor performance,register file size,checkpointed register file,sizable register file,early deallocated register value,physical register,destination architectural register,in-flight instruction,traditional register file management,register file
Status register,Register allocation,Computer science,Memory data register,Parallel computing,Control register,Stack register,Register window,Register renaming,Processor register,Operating system
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6404
0-7695-2231-9
34
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.12
12
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Oguz Ergin142425.84
Deniz Balkan21456.80
Dmitry Ponomarev389356.45
Kanad Ghose41220113.50