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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2015

Branch Prediction and the Performance of Interpreters - Don't Trust Folklore

Erven Rohou
André Seznec

Résumé

Interpreters have been used in many contexts. They provide portability and ease of development at the expense of per-formance. The literature of the past decade covers analysis of why interpreters are slow, and many software techniques to improve them. A large proportion of these works focuses on the dispatch loop, and in particular on the implementa-tion of the switch statement: typically an indirect branch instruction. Folklore attributes a significant penalty to this branch, due to its high misprediction rate. We revisit this as-sumption, considering state-of-the-art branch predictors and the three most recent Intel processor generations on current interpreters. Using both hardware counters on Haswell, the latest Intel processor generation, and simulation of the ITTAGE, we show that the accuracy of indirect branch prediction is no longer critical for interpreters. We further compare the characteristics of these interpreters and analyze why the indirect branch is less important than before.
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Dates et versions

hal-01100647 , version 1 (08-01-2015)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01100647 , version 1

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Erven Rohou, Bharath Narasimha Swamy, André Seznec. Branch Prediction and the Performance of Interpreters - Don't Trust Folklore. International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, Feb 2015, Burlingame, United States. ⟨hal-01100647⟩
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