Dynamically Disabling Way-prediction to Reduce Instruction Replay

Way-predictors have long been used to reduce dynamic cache energy without the performance loss of serial caches. However, they produce variable-latency hits, as incorrect predictions increase load-to-use latency. While the performance impact of these extra cycles has been well-studied, the need to replay subsequent instructions in the pipeline due to the load latency increase has been ignored. In this work we show that way-predictors pay a significant performance penalty beyond previously studied effects due to instruction replays caused by mispredictions. To address this, we propose a solution that learns the confidence of the way-prediction and dynamically disables it when it is likely to mispredict and cause replays. This allows us to reduce cache latency (when we can trust the way-prediction) while still avoiding the need to replay instructions in the pipeline (by avoiding way-mispredictions). Standard way-predictors degrade IPC by 6.9% vs. a parallel cache due to 10% of the instructions being replayed (worst case 42.3%). While our solution decreases way-prediction accuracy by turning off the way-predictor in some cases when it would have been correct, it delivers higher performance than a standard way-predictor. Our confidence-based way-predictor degrades IPC by only 4.4% by replaying just 5.6% of the instructions (worse case 16.3%). This reduces the way-predictor cache energy overhead compared to serial access cache, from 8.5% to 3.7% on average and on the worst case, from 33.8% to 9.5%.