A Survey on Recent Hardware Data Prefetching Approaches with An Emphasis on Servers

Abstract

Data prefetching, i.e., the act of predicting application's future memory accesses and fetching those that are not in the on-chip caches, is a well-known and widely-used approach to hide the long latency of memory accesses. e fruitfulness of data prefetching is evident to both industry and academy: nowadays, almost every high-performance processor incorporates a few data prefetchers for capturing various access pa erns of applications; besides, there is a myriad of proposals for data prefetching in the research literature, where each proposal enhances the e ciency of prefetching in a speci c way. In this survey, we discuss the fundamental concepts in data prefetching and study state-of-the-art hardware data prefetching approaches.