How do I programmatically disable hardware prefetching?

Question

I would like to programmatically disable hardware prefetching.

From Optimizing Application Performance on Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture Using Hardware-Implemented

Answer 1

I am adding an answer here, because the previous ones may not be applicable to all Intel processors.

For my Intel Xeon 5650 (06_2CH family) processor the manual chapter 35 specifies that bits 10 to 8 of the register IA32_MISC_ENABLE at adress 0x1A0 are reserved. I guess that this means I can't toggle prefetcher on and off trhough MSR.

According to an answer from an Intel employee here: "Intel has not disclosed how to disable the prefetchers on processors from Nehalem onward.You'll need to disable the prefetchers using options in the BIOS."