SOFTWARE VALUE PREDICTION USING PENDENCY RECORDS OF PREDICTED PREFETCH VALUES

Profile information can be used to target read operations that cause a substantial portion of misses in a program. A software value prediction technique that utilizes latency and is applied to the targeted read operations facilitates aggressive speculative execution without significant performance impact and without hardware support. A software value predictor issues prefetches for targeted read operations during speculative execution, and utilizes values from these prefetches during subsequent speculative execution, since the earlier prefectches should have completed, to update a software value prediction structure(s). Such a software based value prediction technique allows for aggressive speculative execution without the overhead of a hardware value predictor.