Evaluation and Choice of Various Branch Predictors for Low-Power Embedded Processor

Power is an important design constraint in embedded computing systems. To meet the power constraint, microarchitecture and hardware designed to achieve high performance need to be revisited, from both performance and power angles. This paper studies one of them: branch predictor. As well known, branch prediction is critical to exploit instruction level parallelism effectively, but may incur additional power consumption due to the hardware resource dedicated for branch prediction and the extra power consumed on mispredicted branches. This paper explores the design space of branch prediction mechanisms and tries to find the most beneficial one to realize low-power embedded processor. The sample processor studied is Godson-like processor, which is a dual-issue, out-of-order processor with deep pipeline, supporting MIPS instruction set.