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We observe a non-negligible fraction--3 to 16% in our benchmarks--of dynamically dead instructions, dynamic instruction instances that generate unused results. The majority of these instructions arise from static instructions that also produce useful results. We find that compiler optimization (specifically instruction scheduling) creates a significant portion of these partially dead static instructions. We show that most of the dynamically instructions arise from a small set of static instructions that produce dead values most of the time.We leverage this locality by proposing a dead instruction predictor and presenting a scheme to avoid the execution of predicted-dead instructions. Our predictor achieves an accuracy of 93% while identifying over 91% of the dead instructions using less than 5 KB of state. We achieve such high accuracies by leveraging future control flow information (i.e., branch predictions) to distinguish between useless and useful instances of the same static instruction.We then present a mechanism to avoid the register allocation, instruction scheduling, and execution of predicted dead instructions. We measure reductions in resource utilization averaging over 5% and sometimes exceeding 10%, covering physical register management (allocation and freeing), register file read and write traffic, and data cache accesses. Performance improves by an average of 3.6% on an architecture exhibiting resource contention. Additionally, our scheme frees future compilers from the need to consider the costs of dead instructions, enabling more aggressive code motion and optimization. Simultaneously, it mitigates the need for good path profiling information in making inter-block code motion decisions.

We observe a non-negligible fraction--3 to 16% in our benchmarks--of dynamically dead instructions, dynamic instruction instances that generate unused results. The majority of these instructions arise from static instructions that also produce useful results. We find that compiler optimization (specifically instruction scheduling) creates a significant portion of these partially dead static instructions. We show that most of the dynamically instructions arise from a small set of static instructions that produce dead values most of the time.We leverage this locality by proposing a dead instruction predictor and presenting a scheme to avoid the execution of predicted-dead instructions. Our predictor achieves an accuracy of 93% while identifying over 91% of the dead instructions using less than 5 KB of state. We achieve such high accuracies by leveraging future control flow information (i.e., branch predictions) to distinguish between useless and useful instances of the same static instruction.We then present a mechanism to avoid the register allocation, instruction scheduling, and execution of predicted dead instructions. We measure reductions in resource utilization averaging over 5% and sometimes exceeding 10%, covering physical register management (allocation and freeing), register file read and write traffic, and data cache accesses. Performance improves by an average of 3.6% on an architecture exhibiting resource contention. Additionally, our scheme frees future compilers from the need to consider the costs of dead instructions, enabling more aggressive code motion and optimization. Simultaneously, it mitigates the need for good path profiling information in making inter-block code motion decisions.

We observe a non-negligible fraction--3 to 16% in our benchmarks---of dynamically dead instructions, dynamic instruction instances that generate unused results. The majority of these instructions arise from static instructions that also produce useful results. We find that compiler optimization (specifically instruction scheduling) creates a significant portion of these partially dead static instructions. We show that most of the dynamically dead instructions arise from a small set of static instructions that produce dead values most of the time.We leverage this locality by proposing a dead instruction predictor and presenting a scheme to avoid the execution of predicted-dead instructions. Our predictor achieves an accuracy of 93% while identifying over 91% of the dead instructions using less than 5 KB of state. We achieve such high accuracies by leveraging future control flow information (i.e., branch predictions) to distinguish between useless and useful instances of the same static instruction.We then present a mechanism to avoid the register allocation, instluction scheduling, and execution of predicted dead instructions. We measure reductions in resource utilization averaging over 5% and sometimes exceeding 10%, covenng physical register management (allocation and freeing), register file read and write traffic, and data cache accesses. Performance improves by an average of 3.6% on an architecture exhibiting resource contention. Additionally, our scheme frees future compilers from the need to consider the costs of dead instructions, enabling more aggressive code motion and optimization. Simultaneously, it mitigates the need for good path profiling information in making inter-block code motion decisions.Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroorh use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.An additional complication arises because the exact costs incurred by a particular optimization are not clear. Many compile-time optimizations create partially dead instructions [8].