Abstract: Data prefetching is an approach to reducing cache miss latencies,which can appropriately fill the speed gap between the microprocessor and DRAM.Recently,Intel processor families employ several prefetching mechanisms to accelerate the movement of data or code to Cache,and improve performance.By a brief analysis of the memory hierarchy of Intel64 architecture,data prefetching mechanism of X86/X64 architecture,including hardware prefetching and software prefetching,was deeply dissected,and then the compiler support for software prefetching mechanism was analyzed.After testing the performance of data prefetcher of Intel64 architecture for nested loop,we concluded several factors affecting the effect of data prefetching.These works provide a valuable contribution for the research and deve-lopment of the loop-array-prefetching optimization on the Intel platform.

Key words: Intel 64,Cache,Hardware prefetching,Software prefetching,GCC,ICC