| Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) provides significant increase in microprocessor performance by issuing instructions from multiple threads per clock cycle making use of both thread-level and instruction-level parallelism. Branch prediction accuracy, a key component of processor performance, also influences the performance of an SMT. Scheduling instructions from other threads hide the misprediction latencies. Branch prediction accuracy is still important in SMT processors to reduce latencies of individual threads and provide a diverse mix of threads to the instruction scheduler.{09}Some of the parameters affect the performance of an SMT even if the branch prediction accuracy is high. This thesis evaluates the effects of parameters like the cache, load store, and register size, memory access time, and misprediction latencies on the performance improvement with branch prediction accuracy. |
