Evaluation of Instruction Prefetch Methods for Coresonic DSP Processor

Abstract: With increasing demands on mobile communication transfer rates the circuits in mobile phones must be designed for higher performance while maintaining low power consumption for increased battery life. One possible way to improve an existing architecture is to implement instruction prefetching. By predicting which instructions will be executed ahead of time the instructions can be prefetched from memory to increase performance and some instructions which will be executed again shortly can be stored temporarily to avoid fetching them from the memory multiple times. By creating a trace driven simulator the existing hardware can be simulated while running a realistic scenario. Different methods of instruction prefetch can be implemented into this simulator to measure how they perform. It is shown that the execution time can be reduced by up to five percent and the amount of memory accesses can be reduced by up to 25 percent with a simple loop buffer and return stack. The execution time can be reduced even further with the more complex methods such as branch target prediction and branch condition prediction.