TARGET BRANCH PREDICTION USING CORRELATION OF LOCAL TARGET HISTORIES

摘要

A system for predicting multiple targets for a single branch includes: a branch target buffer that includes a previous next address for an instruction and that receives an indirect instruction address to provide a first branch target prediction; a first branch table for capturing local past target information of an indirect branch in an encoded form; a second branch table which is a correlation table for storing potential branch targets based on a local branch history and which provides a second branch target prediction when the first branch target prediction is not successful; an exclusion predictor for inhibiting updates of inefficient entries; and a multiplexer to select the predicted target as output.