On instruction and data prefetch mechanisms

Cache misses are becoming relatively more expensive in modern processors. This is largely due do the fact that processor clock rates are increasing faster than the latency of main memory is improving. Prefetch has been used to hide memory latency. There are at least two kinds of prefetches - automatic prefetch and instruction-initiated prefetch. This paper described an implementation-independent instruction-initiated prefetch mechanism for I-cache and an automatic prefetch mechanism for D-cache to hide the memory latency associated with cache misses. Simulation results taken from execution traces of 5 commercial relational database management systems were used to illustrate the potential benefit of the proposed mechanisms.