globalHistoryBits, globalPredictorSize, and choicePredictorSize are decoupled.
globalHistoryBits controls how much history is kept, global and choice
predictor sizes control how much of that history is used when accessing
predictor tables. This way, global and choice predictors can actually be
different sizes, and it is no longer possible to walk off the predictor arrays
and cause a seg fault.
There are now individual thresholds for choice, global, and local saturating
counters, so that taken/not taken decisions are correct even when the
predictors' counters' sizes are different.
The interface for localPredictorSize has been removed from TournamentBP because
the value can be calculated from localHistoryBits.
Committed by: Nilay Vaish <nilay@cs.wisc.edu>
This patch changes the cache-related latencies from an absolute time
expressed in Ticks, to a number of cycles that can be scaled with the
clock period of the caches. Ultimately this patch serves to enable
future work that involves dynamic frequency scaling. As an immediate
benefit it also makes it more convenient to specify cache performance
without implicitly assuming a specific CPU core operating frequency.
The stat blocked_cycles that actually counter in ticks is now updated
to count in cycles.
As the timing is now rounded to the clock edges of the cache, there
are some regressions that change. Plenty of them have very minor
changes, whereas some regressions with a short run-time are perturbed
quite significantly. A follow-on patch updates all the statistics for
the regressions.
In the current caches the hit latency is paid twice on a miss. This patch lets
a configurable response latency be set of the cache for the backward path.
