loading...
Asymmetrically Banked Value-Aware Register Files
Porto Alegre, Brazil March 09-March 11
DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ISVLSI.2007.27IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposiu ...
 This Article 
 
PDF
HTML
 
 Share 
   
 Bibliographic References 
   
 Add to: 
 
Digg
Furl
Spurl
Blink
Simpy
Google
Del.icio.us
Y!MyWeb
 
 Search 
   
Shuai Wang, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Hongyan Yang, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Jie Hu, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Sotirios G. Ziavras, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Designing high-performance low-power register files is of critical importance to the continuation of current performance advances in wide-issue and deeply-pipelined superscalar microprocessors. In this paper, we propose a new microarchitecture, the asymmetrically-banked value-aware register file (AB-VARF), to exploit the prevailing narrowwidth register values for low-latency and power-efficient register file designs. The register bit-widths of different banks in our AB-VARF register files are specifically customized to capture different narrow-width values. Augmented with a value width predictor, the register renaming logic is slightly tuned to rename predicted narrow-width registers to the corresponding narrow-width banks. Our experimental evaluation with SPEC CINT2000 benchmark suites shows that AB-VARF reduces the energy consumption by 92.6% over a conventional register file, on the average, at the cost of a 6.6% performance loss to an ideal 1-cycle monolithic register file.
Citation:
Shuai Wang, Hongyan Yang, Jie Hu, Sotirios G. Ziavras, "Asymmetrically Banked Value-Aware Register Files," isvlsi, pp.363-368, IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI '07), 2007
Usage of this product signifies your acceptance of the Terms of Use.