Efficient Instruction Scheduling using Real-time Load Delay Tracking

Abstract: Many hardware structures in today's high-performance out-of-order processors do not scale in an efficient way. To address this, different solutions have been proposed that build execution schedules in an energy-efficient manner. Issue time prediction processors are one such solution that use data-flow dependencies and predefined instruction latencies to predict issue times of repeated instructions. In this work, we aim to improve their accuracy, and consequently their performance, in an energy efficient way. We accomplish this by taking advantage of two key observations. First, memory accesses often take additional time to arrive than the static, predefined access latency that is used to describe these systems. Second, we find that these memory access delays often repeat across iterations of the same code. This, in turn, allows us to predict the arrival time of these accesses. In this work, we introduce a new processor microarchitecture, that replaces a complex reservation-station-based scheduler with an efficient, scalable alternative. Our proposed scheduling technique tracks real-time delays of loads to accurately predict instruction issue times, and uses a reordering mechanism to prioritize instructions based on that prediction, achieving close-to-out-of-order processor performance. To accomplish this in an energy-efficient manner we introduce: (1) an instruction delay learning mechanism that monitors repeated load instructions and learns their latest delay, (2) an issue time predictor that uses learned delays and data-flow dependencies to predict instruction issue times and (3) priority queues that reorder instructions based on their issue time prediction. Together, our processor achieves 86.2% of the performance of a traditional out-of-order processor, higher than previous efficient scheduler proposals, while still consuming 30% less power.