From the course: Computer Architecture Essentials

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Overcoming pipeline hazards with hardware

Overcoming pipeline hazards with hardware

From the course: Computer Architecture Essentials

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Overcoming pipeline hazards with hardware

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- [Speaker] And what about hardware techniques? Over the years, countless improvements have been added to pipeline processors to make them tolerant to control and data hazards. Let's start with controlled hazards. One common hardware addition is a branch predictor, which attempts to predict whether a branch will be taken or not. Of course, it's impossible to predict the future with 100% certainty. However, based on the usual behavior of programs and by observing the behavior of the specific program that a CPU is currently running, a special piece of hardware can produce an educated guess about the outcome of a branch that has just been fetched. This guest comes from a tendency of branches repeating their behavior. Branch predictors contain complex circuitry to maintain a table like this one efficiently. This prediction table is implemented in a piece of memory with a fixed number of entries. Each entry of this table keeps track of the address where a conditional branch is found, the…

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