Nayana Prasad Nagendra will present her Pre FPO "A Frontend For All Workloads" on Monday, November 4, 2019 at 11:30am in CS 302. The members of her committee are as follows: David August (adviser), Tipp Moseley (Google), David Wentzlaff (ELE), and Sharad Malik (ELE). Everyone is invited to attend her talk. The abstract follows below. Warehouse-Scale Computing applications experience an order of magnitude more front-end stalls than desktop applications because their code footprints are well beyond the capacity of today’s processor structures, including instruction caches and branch target buffers. Current approaches to reducing front-end stalls rely, at least in part, on some subset of processor structures having sufficient capacity. Since working set sizes for important applications will continue to grow faster than processor structures (27% Year-over-Year growth in web-search instruction working set size for example vs. 7% for L1 instruction cache), these approaches are not viable. Instead, we propose Predicted Path Prefetching with Confidence Hedging, a front-end architecture that does not rely on the capacity to prevent front-end stalls by also prefetching the path not predicted when confidence in the path prediction is low. Initial results show many fewer instruction cache misses per kilo instructions with similar prefetch costs compared to existing techniques.