The Superfluous Load Queue

Abstract

In an out-of-order core, the load queue (LQ), the store queue (SQ), and the store buffer (SB) are responsible for ensuring: i) correct forwarding of stores to loads and ii) correct ordering among loads (with respect to external stores). The first requirement safeguards the sequential semantics of program execution and applies to both serial and parallel code; the second requirement safeguards the semantics of coherence and consistency (e.g., TSO). In particular, loads search the SQ/SB for the latest value that may have been produced by a store, and stores and invalidations search the LQ to find speculative loads in case they violate uniprocessor or multiprocessor ordering. To meet timing constraints the LQ and SQ/SB system is composed of CAM structures that are frequently searched. This results in high complexity, cost, and significant difficulty to scale, but is the current state of the art. Prior research demonstrated the feasibility of a non-associative LQ by replaying loads at commit. There is a steep cost however: a significant increase in L1 accesses and contention for L1 ports. This is because prior work assumes Sequential Consistency and completely ignores the existence of a SB in the system. In contrast, we intentionally delay stores in the SB to achieve a total management of stores and loads in a core, while still supporting TSO. Our main result is that we eliminate the LQ without burdening the L1 with extra accesses. Store forwarding is achieved by delaying our own stores until speculatively issued loads are validated on commit, entirely in-core; TSO load→load ordering is preserved by delaying remote external stores in their SB until our own speculative reordered loads commit. While the latter is inspired by recent work on non-speculative load reordering, our contribution here is to show that this can be accomplished without having a load queue. Eliminating the LQ results in both energy savings and performance improvement from the elimination of LQ-induced stalls.