Array Tracking Prefetcher for Indirect Accesses

Abstract

Indirect memory accesses have irregular access patterns and concomitantly poor spatial locality. To address this problem, we propose the Array Tracking Prefetcher which tracks array-based indirect memory accesses using a novel combination of software and hardware. Our results show that ATP yields average speedup of 1.60 over the baseline single-core without prefetching. By contrast, the speedup for conventional software and hardware-based prefetching, is 1.49 and 1.16, respectively. For four-cores, the average speedups for ATP, software, and hardware are 1.49, 1.38, and 1.11, respectively.