Abstract

Previous research has shown that the SPEC benchmarks achieve low miss ratios in relatively small instruction caches. This paper presents evidence that current software-development practices produce applications that exhibit substantially higher instruction-cache miss ratios than do the SPEC benchmarks. To represent these trends, we have assembled a collection of applications, called the Instruction Benchmark Suite (IBS), that provides a better test of instruction-cache performance. We discuss the rationale behind the design of IBS and characterize its behavior relative to the SPEC benchmark suite. Our analysis is based on trace-driven and trap-driven simulations and takes into full account both the application and operating-system components of the workloads. This paper then reexamines a collection of previously-proposed hardware mechanisms for improving instruction-fetch performance

Citations