Methods and systems for nested stream prefetching for general purpose central processing units

A method and hardware system to remove the overhead caused by having stream handling instructions in nested loops. Where code contains inner loops, nested in outer loops, a compiler pass identifies qualified nested streams and generates ISA specific instructions for transferring stream information linking an inner loop stream with an outer loop stream, to hardware components of a co-designed prefetcher. The hardware components include a frontend able to decode and execute instructions for a stream linking information transfer mechanism, a stream engine unit with a streams configuration table (SCT) having a field for allowing a subordinate stream to stay pending for values from its master stream, and a stream prefetch manager with buffers for storing values of current elements of a master stream, and with a nested streams control unit for reconfiguring and iterating the streams.