This work proposes a new fetch unit model, inspired in the trace processor [8]. Instead of fetching instruction traces, our fetch unit will fetch instruction streams. An instruction stream is a sequential run of instructions, dened by the starting address and the stream length. All branches included in the stream are assumed to be not taken, except for the terminating one, which should be always taken (else, we are terminating the stream prematurely). We will show how stream fetching approaches the four factors determining instruction fetch performance: the width of instructions fetched per cycle, instruction cache misses, branch prediction throughput and branch prediction accuracy. 1 Fetch performance 1.1 Width of instruction fetch All instructions in a stream are consecutive in memory, and a stream contains no taken branches. This makes it very simple to obtain several consecutive instruction cache lines from a multi-banked cache, and simply select the desired instruction ...

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