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Software Directed Issue Queue Power Reduction
San Francisco, California February 12-February 16
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/HPCA.2005.3211th International Symposium on High- ...
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Timothy M. Jones, University of Edinburgh, UK
Michael F. P. O'Boyle, University of Edinburgh, UK
Jaume Abella, Universitat Polit?cnica de Catalunya
Antonio Gonz?lez, Universitat Polit?cnica de Catalunya
The issue logic of a superscalar processor dissipates a large amount of static and dynamic power. Furthermore, its power density makes it a hot-spot requiring expensive cooling systems and additional packaging.
In this paper we present a novel software assisted approach to power reduction where the processor dynamically resizes the issue queue based on compiler analysis. The compiler passes information to the processor about the number of entries needed which limits the number of instructions dispatched and resident in the queue. This saves power without adversely affecting performance.
Compared with recently proposed hardware techniques, our approach is faster, simpler and saves more power. Using a simplistic scheme we achieve 47% dynamic and 31% static power savings in the issue queue with only a 2.2% performance loss. We then show that the performance loss can be reduced to less than 1.3% with 45% dynamic and 30% static power savings, outperforming all current approaches.
Citation:
Timothy M. Jones, Michael F. P. O'Boyle, Jaume Abella, Antonio Gonz?lez, "Software Directed Issue Queue Power Reduction," hpca, pp.144-153, 11th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA'05), 2005
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