Reducing cache hierarchy energy consumption by predicting forwarding and disabling associative sets
The first level data cache in modern processors has become a major consumer of energy due to its increasing size and high frequency access rate. In order to reduce this high energy consumption, we propose in this paper a straightforward filtering technique based on a highly accurate forwarding predi...
| Autores: | , , , , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2012 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) |
| Repositorio: | Docta Complutense |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/44467 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/44467 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | 004 Energy consumption Filtering Forwarding predictor Cache hierarchy Informática (Informática) 1203.17 Informática |
| Sumario: | The first level data cache in modern processors has become a major consumer of energy due to its increasing size and high frequency access rate. In order to reduce this high energy consumption, we propose in this paper a straightforward filtering technique based on a highly accurate forwarding predictor. Specifically, a simple structure predicts whether a load instruction will obtain its corresponding data via forwarding from the load-store structure - thus avoiding the data cache access - or if it will be provided by the data cache. This mechanism manages to reduce the data cache energy consumption by an average of 21.5% with a negligible performance penalty of less than 0.1%. Furthermore, in this paper we focus on the cache static energy consumption too by disabling a portion of sets of the L2 associative cache. Overall, when merging both proposals, the combined L1 and L2 total energy consumption is reduced by an average of 29.2% with a performance penalty of just 0.25%. |
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