Tuning Branch Predictors to Support Java Method Invocation

Java's object oriented nature along with its distributed nature make it a good choice for network computing. The use of virtual methods associated with Java's object oriented behavior requires accurate target prediction for indirect branches. This is critical to the performance of Java applications executed on deeply pipelined, wide issue processors. In this paper, we investigate the use of a path history based predictor to accurately determine the target of these virtual methods. The effect of varying the various parameters of the predictor on the misprediction rates is studied using various Java benchmarks. Results from this study show that the execution of Java code will benefit from more sophisticated branch-predictors.