Performance Implications of Hard-Faults in Non-Architectural Structures

Continuous circuit and wire miniaturization increasingly exert more pressure on the computer designers to address the issue of reliable operation in the presence of hard-faults. Virtually all previous work on hard-fault reliability addresses problems that arise when a fault occurs in architectural resources, such as the register file or caches. However, hard-faults can happen in non-architectural resources, such as predictors and replacement bits. Although non-architectural hard-faults do not affect correctness they can degrade a processor performance significantly and, therefore, may render them as important to deal with as architectural