ACCURACY OF CORRELATION PREFETCHING VIA BLOCK CORRELATION AND ADAPTIVE PREFETCH DEGREE SELECTION

In the described embodiments, a method for prefetching data and/or instructions may include generating control flow information for each retired branch instruction. A correlation table may be maintained based on the generated control flow information and cache miss addresses for each retired instruction that incurs one or more cache misses. Each correlation table entry may correspond to an index, and may contain a tag and a correlation list. The correlation list may consist of a specified number of cache miss addresses that most frequently follow the cache miss address for the index. A prefetch operation may be performed for each cache miss based on the contents of the correlation table entry corresponding to the index. The index may generated using a combination of bits of a given cache miss address and one or more bits of the program control flow information for the given cache miss address.