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People has tried this but as other have pointed out, it doesn’t get you very far.

Along the same lines is runahead execution which is not directly related to branch prediction, but follows the similar idea you had that if you have all these functional units , you might as well try to figure out what you should start prefetching by speculatly executing the most likely sequence of instructions- even if you are waiting on data for those instructions!



Runahead is a totally different concept though, it attempts to extract MLP and throws away all the work even if it was valid.


True, I was just reminded of it by the original poster’s idea.


Fair enough, runahead is a cool idea after all :)




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