Bhargav Reddy Godala will present his Pre FPO "Criticality Aware Front-End" on November 6th, 2023 in Friend Center 125 at 10:30am. The members of his committee are as follows: Examiners: Prof. David August (adviser) Prof. Margaret Martonosi Prof. David Wentzlaff Readers: Gilles Pokam (Intel) Svilen Kanev (Google) (approved by Grad School) Prof. David August (adviser) Talk title and abstract follow below. Title: Criticality Aware Front-End Abstract: Code footprints continue to grow faster than instruction caches, putting additional pressure on existing front-end structures like iCaches, BTBs, and iTLBs. Even with aggressive decoupled front-ends and accurate fetch-directed instruction prefetching (FDIP), modern processors experience significant front-end stalls. To address this, this thesis proposes Priority Directed Instruction Prefetching (PDIP), a novel instruction prefetching technique that complements FDIP by issuing prefetches for targets along the resteer path where FDIP stalls occur. PDIP identifies these targets and associates them with a trigger for future prefetch. When paired with EMISSARY, a recently proposed cost-aware cache management policy, PDIP achieves a geomean IPC speedup of 3.7% across a set of industry-relevant benchmark programs using a budget of only 43.5KB. PDIP achieves 62% of the ideal prefetching performance.