Horizontal demand prefetching: A novel approach to eliminating the jump problem

The principle of a novel prefetching strategy, horizontal demand prefetching, is presented. This mechanism allows deep prefetching without jump-related misses by prefetching shallowly across several independent streams in a horizontal fashion. Multistream processors using this technique can achieve very high memory utilization. The mechanism supports very efficient multitasking and hardware process synchronization. The structure and performance of a prototype minicomputer using this mechanism are presented.