Access map pattern matching for data cache prefetch

A novel data prefetching method -- access map pattern matching (AMPM) -- that uses "memory access map" is proposed. The AMPM prefetching concentrate hardware resources on collecting the access footprint of the frequently accessed area which we called "hot zones". 2-bit state is associated with each cache lines of hot zone. A set of these states is called "memory access map". Prefetch requests are generated from the pattern matching of the memory access map. The pattern matching detects multiple memory access patterns in parallel and generates more prefetch requests than conventional prefetchers. The evaluation result shows that the AMPM prefetcher improves performance by 42.0% in FP benchmarks.