1)

a) Stride prefetching is a hardware prefetching mechanism that identies memory access patterns that are

predictable and one stride apart from each other. For example, a loop that accesses address A, then

A+8, A+16, A+24, and so on. Another example would be: A, A+2, A+4, A+8, A+16, A+32, and so

on. Write a for loop where the hardware stride prefetching would work eectively.

b) Naturally, a stride prefetching would not work for a pointer-based data structure. For example, traversing

a linked-list, the processor would not be able to prefetch the next element when processing the current

one. Describe a prefetching mechanism that could overcome this problem.

c) Could prefetching increase cache misses? Explain how.