An Energy-Efficient Clustered Superscalar Processor

Toshinori SATO
Akihiro CHIYONOBU

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E88-C    No.4    pp.544-551
Publication Date: 2005/04/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 10.1093/ietele/e88-c.4.544
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Low-Power LSI and Low-Power IP)
Category: Digital
Keyword: 
low power architecture,  energy reduction,  clustered processors,  dual-voltage pipeline,  critical path prediction,  

Full Text: PDF(538.7KB)>>
Buy this Article


Summary: 
Power consumption is a major concern in embedded microprocessors design. Reducing power has also been a critical design goal for general-purpose microprocessors. Since they require high performance as well as low power, power reduction at the cost of performance cannot be accepted. There are a lot of device-level techniques that reduce power with maintaining performance. They select non-critical paths as candidates for low-power design, and performance-oriented design is used only in speed-critical paths. The same philosophy can be applied to architectural-level design. We evaluate a technique, which exploits dynamic information regarding instruction criticality in order to reduce power. We evaluate an instruction steering policy for a clustered microarchitecture, which is based on instruction criticality, and find it is substantially energy-efficient while it suffers performance degradation.