Indirect-branch prediction becomes a performance bottleneck for modern processors as object-oriented programs are more commonly used recently.This paper proposes a Hint-indexed Indirect-branch prediction (HIP) technique.It first uses the existing branch direction predictor to distinguish different indirect-branch occurrences

and treats the corresponding data as hints.Then

those hints are calculated with the indirect-branch addresses to generate the virtual addresses

which are used to access the BTB for the predicted indirect-branch targets.Our evaluation shows that HIP could achieve attractive performance improvement without large dedicated storages.Compared to that of a commonly-used BTB

it improves average performance by 20.38%.Compared with previously proposed hardware-based predictors

HIP improves performance by 8.66% over that of the VPC predictor

and it achieves the equivalent performance improvement provided by a 48KB Tagged Target Cache (TTC) predictor.The energy consumption is also reduced by 14.34% over the baseline.