A Case for Speculative Strength Reduction

Most high performance general purpose processors leverage register renaming to implement optimizations such as move elimination or zero-idiom elimination. Those optimizations can be seen as forms of strength reduction whereby a faster but semantically equivalent operation is substituted to a slower operation. In this letter, we argue that other reductions can be performed dynamically if input values of instructions are known in time, i.e., prior to renaming. We study the potential for leveraging Value Prediction to achieve that goal and show that in SPEC2k17, an average of 3.3 percent (up to 6.8 percent) of the dynamic instructions could dynamically be strength reduced. Our experiments suggest that a state-of-the-art value predictor allows to capture 59.7 percent of that potential on average (up to 99.6 percent).