The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):
instruction prefetch
prefetch
A technique which attempts to minimise the time
a processor spends waiting for machine instructions to be
fetched from memory. Instructions following the one currently
being executed are loaded into a prefetch queue when the
processor's external bus is otherwise idle. If the
processor executes a branch instruction or receives an
interrupt then the queue must be flushed and reloaded from
the new address.
Instruction prefetch is often combined with pipelining in
an attempt to keep the pipeline busy.
By 1995 most processors used prefetching, e.g. Motorola
680x0, Intel 80x86.
[First processors using prefetch?]
(1998-03-29)