Hardware prefetching in corei3

Question

Does corei3 support hardware prefetching through hardware prefetcher? If yes, how do I enable/disable it?

Answer 1

Intel Core i3 processors definitely support hardware prefetching, though Intel's documentation tends to be very weak on details. The brand name "Core i3" refers to both "Nehalem" based and "Sandy Bridge" based processors, so you have to check the specific model number to know which one you are dealing with.

To make things more complicated, newer Intel processors (Nehalem/Westmere/Sandy Bridge) have several different hardware prefetchers -- at least three are mentioned in the Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual, Volume 3B (publication 253669). Table 30-25 "MSR_OFFCORE_RSP_x Request Type Field Definition" mentions "DCU prefetch" and "L2 prefetchers". These are also mentioned in Appendix A-2, Table A-2, which describes the performance counter events for Core i7, i5, and i3 processors. Event 4EH in Table A-2 mentions that there are both "L1 streamer and IP-Based (IPP) HW prefetchers". There are a few more words on this topic in the corresponding entry (for event 4EH) in Appendix A.4, Table A-6, which describes the performance counters for Westmere processors.

Appendix B-2, Table B-3 in the same document discusses the MSRs (Model Specific Registers) for the Intel Core Microarchitecture, but it looks like many of these carry over into newer versions. Register 1A0h shows that 4 bits control prefetching behavior:

• Bit 9: Hardware Prefetcher Disable
• Bit 19: Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch Disable
• Bit 37: DCU Prefetcher Disable
• Bit 39: IP Prefetcher Disable

Tools to enable and disable prefetchers are discussed in: How do I programmatically disable hardware prefetching?