OverCome: Coarse-Grained Instruction Commit with Handover Register Renaming

Abstract

Coarse-grained instruction commit mechanisms enabled the effective size of the instruction window to be as large as possible by committing a group of instructions atomically. Within a group, the reorder buffer (ROB) and physical registerfile (PRF) entries are conservatively managed, and thus the instruction window can handle more in-flight instructions beyond the hardware limit. However, previous approaches have suffered from high storage requirements for managing group information and unbalanced lifetime of instruction window resources, i.e., the ROB and PRF. In this paper, we propose an OverCome microarchitecture based on a history-based approach to address these problems. First, OverCome retains the conservative allocation of the ROB regardless of the group size limit, thereby providing high scalability. Second, it handles the information of numerous groups with a low storage cost. These two techniques achieve a significant reduction in the pressure on the ROB; thus, a new bottleneck arises: the pressure on the PRF. To address this issue, we propose a novel register renaming technique to reduce the lifetime of physical registers to a large extent, by tightly coupling the early release and lazy allocation schemes. Thus, the proposed design strikes a balance between the ROB and PRF requirements. Detailed evaluation of the proposed techniques on a state-of-the-art superscalar processor shows that our proposals augment the effective size of the instruction window by more than 4×, with a net overhead of less than 3 percent of the core area.

Ipoom Jeong

Assistant Professor

My research interests include CPU/GPU microarchitectures, memory/storage system designs, and smart-I/O devices