Branch Direction Prediction With Vote Predictor

Abstract

As modern microprocessors employ deeper pipelines and issue multiple instructions per cycle, they are becoming increasingly dependent on accurate branch prediction. Up to now, various branch prediction strategies have been proposed. However, from the experiment we find that there is no one branch predictor is good for all benchmarks. With the factor above, we propose the vote predictor, which combine three different branch predictors to make prediction. From the simulation results, it shows that the vote predictor outperforms its component predictors that make prediction alone. With 4K entries of pattern history table, the vote predictor increases the prediction accuracy with one of its most accurate component predictor from 1% to 2%