Branch prediction is believed by many to be a solved problem, with state-of-the-art predictors achieving near-perfect prediction for many programs. In this article, we conduct a detailed simulation of graph-processing workloads in the GAPBS benchmark suite and show that branch mispredictions occur frequently and are still a large limitation on performance in key graph-processing applications. We provide a detailed analysis of which branches are mispredicting and show that a few key branches are the main source of performance degradation across the graph-processing benchmarks we looked at. We also propose a few ideas for future work to improve branch prediction accuracy on graph workloads.

中文翻译：

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图处理专用分支预测器的案例

许多人认为分支预测是一个已解决的问题，最先进的预测器为许多程序实现了近乎完美的预测。在本文中，我们对 GAPBS 基准套件中的图形处理工作负载进行了详细模拟，并表明分支错误预测经常发生，并且仍然是关键图形处理应用程序性能的一个很大限制。我们详细分析了哪些分支是错误预测的，并表明在我们查看的图形处理基准测试中，一些关键分支是性能下降的主要来源。我们还为未来的工作提出了一些想法，以提高图工作负载的分支预测准确性。