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* Stream buffers were developed based on the concept of "one block lookahead (OBL) scheme" proposed by [[Alan Jay Smith]].<ref name=":3" />
* Stream [[Data buffer|buffers]] are one of the most common hardware based prefetching techniques in use. This technique was originally proposed by [[Norman Jouppi]] in 1990<ref name=":1">{{cite conference |last=Jouppi |first=Norman P. |year=1990 |title=Improving direct-mapped cache performance by the addition of a small fully-associative cache and prefetch buffers |conference=17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture – ISCA 1990 |___location=New York, New York, USA |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery Press |pages=364–373 |citeseerx=10.1.1.37.6114 |doi=10.1145/325164.325162 |isbn=0-89791-366-3 |book-title=Proceedings of the 17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture – ISCA 1990}}</ref> and many variations of this method have been developed since.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Chen|first1=Tien-Fu|last2=Baer|first2=Jean-Loup|s2cid=1450745|date=1995-05-01|title=Effective hardware-based data prefetching for high-performance processors|journal=IEEE Transactions on Computers|volume=44|issue=5|pages=609–623|doi=10.1109/12.381947|issn=0018-9340}}</ref><ref>{{Cite conference |last1=Palacharla |first1=S. |last2=Kessler |first2=R. E. |date=1994-01-01 |title=Evaluating Stream Buffers As a Secondary Cache Replacement |conference=21st Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture |___location=Chicago, Illinois, USA |publisher=IEEE Computer Society Press |pages=24–33 |citeseerx=10.1.1.92.3031 |doi=10.1109/ISCA.1994.288164 |isbn=978-0818655104}}</ref><ref name="grannaes">{{cite journal| last1=Grannaes | first1=Marius | last2=Jahre | first2=Magnus | last3=Natvig | first3=Lasse | title=Storage Efficient Hardware Prefetching using Delta-Correlating Prediction Tables |citeseerx=10.1.1.229.3483 |journal=Journal of Instruction-Level Parallelism |issue=13 |year=2011 |pages=1–16}}</ref> The basic idea is that the [[cache miss]] address (and <math>k</math> subsequent addresses) are fetched into a separate buffer of depth <math>k</math>. This buffer is called a stream buffer and is separate from cache. The processor then consumes data/instructions from the stream buffer if the address associated with the prefetched blocks match the requested address generated by the program executing on the processor. The figure below illustrates this setup:
[[File:CachePrefetching_StreamBuffers.png|center|
* Whenever the prefetch mechanism detects a miss on a memory block, say A, it allocates a stream to begin prefetching successive blocks from the missed block onward. If the stream buffer can hold 4 blocks, then we would prefetch A+1, A+2, A+3, A+4 and hold those in the allocated stream buffer. If the processor consumes A+1 next, then it shall be moved "up" from the stream buffer to the processor's cache. The first entry of the stream buffer would now be A+2 and so on. This pattern of prefetching successive blocks is called '''Sequential Prefetching'''. It is mainly used when contiguous locations are to be prefetched. For example, it is used when prefetching instructions.
* This mechanism can be scaled up by adding multiple such 'stream buffers' - each of which would maintain a separate prefetch stream.<ref>{{Cite conference |last1=Ishii |first1=Yasuo |last2=Inaba |first2=Mary |last3=Hiraki |first3=Kei |date=2009-06-08 |title=Access map pattern matching for data cache prefetch |url=https://doi.org/10.1145/1542275.1542349 |conference=ICS 2009 |___location=New York, New York, USA |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery |pages=499–500 |doi=10.1145/1542275.1542349 |isbn=978-1-60558-498-0 |book-title=Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Supercomputing |s2cid=37841036}}</ref> For each new miss, there would be a new stream buffer allocated and it would operate in a similar way as described above.
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