CoPTA: Contiguous Pattern Speculating TLB Architecture

Yichen Yang, Haojie Ye, Yuhan Chen, Xueyang Liu, Nishil Talati, Xin He, Trevor N. Mudge, Ronald G. Dreslinski

Abstract: With the growing size of real-world datasets running on CPUs, address translation has become a significant performance bottleneck. To translate virtual addresses into physical addresses, modern operating systems perform several levels of page table walks (PTWs) in memory. Translation look-aside buffers (TLBs) are used as caches to keep recently used translation information. However, as datasets increase in size, both the TLB miss rate and the overhead of PTWs worsen, causing severe performance bottlenecks. Using a diverse set of workloads, we show the PTW overhead consumes an average of 20% application execution time.