Bootstrapping: Using SMT Hardware to Improve Single-Thread Performance

Decoupled look-ahead (DLA) architectures have been shown to be an effective way to improve single-thread performance. However, a default implementation requires an additional core. While an SMT flavor is possible, a naive implementation is inefficient and thus slow. In this paper, we propose an optimized implementation called Bootstrapping that makes DLA just as effective on a single (SMT) core as using two cores. While fusing two cores can improve single-thread performance by 1.23x, Bootstrapping provides a speedup of 1.51.