An Energy Efficient Analysis of Hardware Prefetching Techniques : A Review

Abstract: The paper presents a review on different hardware prefetching techniques. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar to hardware prefetching. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of current work are summarized. Memory latency and bandwidth are progressing at a much slower pace than processor performance. A widely explored approach to improve cache performance is hardware prefetching that allows the pre-loading of data in the cache before they are referenced. Data prefetching has been considered as an effective way to mask data access latency caused by cache misses and to bridge the performance gap between processor and memory. Different hardware architecture and prefetching patterns are considered in this paper. Some of the energy preservation schemes are discussed and the results obtained from different methods are given in brief.

Keywords: Prefetching, Context Based Prefetching.