Speculative Execution in High Performance Computer Architectures

Describes many advances in speculative execution techniques. This book covers research projects as well as commercial implementations that demonstrate the value of this latency-hiding technique. It reviews control speculation techniques that use instruction cache prefetching, branch prediction and predication, and multi-path execution.

Until now, there were few textbooks that focused on the dynamic subject of speculative execution, a topic that is crucial to the development of high performance computer architectures. Speculative Execution in High Performance Computer Architectures describes many recent advances in speculative execution techniques. It covers cutting-edge research projects, as well as numerous commercial implementations that demonstrate the value of this latency-hiding technique.

The book begins with a review of control speculation techniques that use instruction cache prefetching, branch prediction and predication, and multi-path execution. It then examines dataflow speculation techniques including data cache prefetching, address value and data value speculation, pre-computation, and coherence speculation. This textbook also explores multithreaded approaches, emphasizing profile-guided speculation, speculative microarchitectures, and compiler techniques.