Temporal prefetching

Many applications, including big-data server applications, frequently encounter data misses. Consequently, they lose significant performance potential. Fortunately, data accesses of many of these applications follow temporal correlations, which means data accesses repeat over time. Temporal correlations occur because applications usually consist of loops, and hence, the sequence of instructions that constitute the body of a loop repeats many times, leading to data access repetition. Temporal data prefetchers take advantage of temporal correlation to predict and prefetch future memory accesses. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of temporal prefetching and present two instances of temporal data prefetchers, STMS and ISB.