Accurate indirect branch prediction

Indirect branch prediction is likely to become increasingly important in the fixture because indirect branches occur more frequently in object-oriented programs. With misprediction rates of around 25% on current processors, indirect branches can incur a significant fraction of branch misprediction overhead even though they remain less frequent than the more predictable conditional branches. We investigate a wide range of two-level predictors dedicated exclusively to indirect branches. Starting with predictors that useful-precision addresses and unlimited tables, we progressively introduce hardware constraints and minimize the loss of predictor performance at each step. For programs from the SPECint95 suite as well as a suite of large C++ applications, a two-level predictor achieves a misprediction rate of 9.8% with a 1 K-entry table and 7.3% with an 8 K-entry table, representing more than a threefold improvement over an ideal BTB. A hybrid predictor further reduces the misprediction rates to 8.98% (1 K) and 5.95% (8 K).