IEICE Transactions on Electronics
Online ISSN : 1745-1353
Print ISSN : 0916-8524
Special Section on Advanced Processors Based on Novel Concepts in Computation
An Energy Efficient Instruction Window for Scalable Processor Architecture
Min CHOISeungryoul MAENG
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2008 Volume E91.C Issue 9 Pages 1427-1436

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Abstract

Modern microprocessors achieve high application performance at the acceptable level of power dissipation. In terms of power to performance trade-off, the instruction window is particularly important. This is because enlarging the window size achieves high performance but naive scaling of the conventional instruction window can severely increase the complexity and power consumption. In this paper, we propose low-power instruction window techniques for contemporary microprocessors. First, the small reorder buffer (SROB) reduces power dissipation by deferred allocation and early release. The deferred allocation delays the SROB allocation of instructions until their all data dependencies are resolved. Then, the instructions are executed in program order and they are released faster from the SROB. This results in higher resource utilization and low power consumption. Second, we replace a conventional issue queue by a direct lookup table (DLT) with an efficient tag translation technique. The translation scheme resolves the instruction dependency, especially for the case of one producer to multiple consumers. The efficiency of the translation scheme stems from the fact that the vast majority of instruction dependency exists within a basic block. Experimental results show that our proposed design reduces the power consumption significantly for SPEC2000 benchmarks.

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© 2008 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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