A prefetcher maintains the state of stored prefetch information, such as a prefetch confidence level, when a prefetch would cross a memory page boundary. The maintained prefetch information can be used both to identify whether the stride pattern for a particular sequence of demand requests persists after the memory page boundary has been crossed, and to continue to issue prefetch requests according to the identified pattern. The prefetcher therefore does not have re-identify a stride pattern each time a page boundary is crossed by a sequence of demand requests, thereby improving the efficiency and accuracy of the prefetcher.
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