Until now, there were few textbooks that focused on the dynamic subject of speculative execution, a topic that is crucial to the development of high performance computer architectures. Speculative Execution in High Performance Computer Architectures describes many recent advances in speculative execution techniques. It covers cutting-edge research projects, as well as numerous commercial implementations that demonstrate the value of this latency-hiding technique.

The book begins with a review of control speculation techniques that use instruction cache prefetching, branch prediction and predication, and multi-path execution. It then examines dataflow speculation techniques including data cache prefetching, address value and data value speculation, pre-computation, and coherence speculation. This textbook also explores multithreaded approaches, emphasizing profile-guided speculation, speculative microarchitectures, and compiler techniques.