Basic-block based instruction prefetching for real-time applications

In the paper, a basic block based instruction prefetching (BBIP) mechanism is proposed that takes advantage of the relative small program size of the real-time application and the all or none attribute of basic blocks during execution. BBIP can not only avoid the useless prefetchings that exist in existing prefetching mechanisms, but also simplify the worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis of real-time applications. Results of simulation on 17 typical real-time benchmarks show that, about 70% to 80% misses can be removed, which leads to a remarkable decrease in execution time, about 50% for most benchmarks, even as high as 58%, compared with that collected on caches without instruction prefetching.