A hybrid-scheduling approach for energy-efficient superscalar processors

The management of power consumption while simultaneously delivering acceptable levels of performance is becoming a critical task in high-performance, general-purpose micro-architectures. Nearly a third of the energy consumed in these processors can be attributed to the dynamic scheduling hardware that identifies multiple instructions to issue in parallel. The energy consumption of this complex logic structure is projected to grow dramatically in future wide-issue processors.; This research develops a novel Hybrid-Scheduling approach that synergistically combines the advantages of compile-time instruction scheduling and dynamic scheduling to reduce energy consumption in the dynamic issue hardware. This approach is predicated on the key observation that all instructions and all basic-blocks in a program are not equal; some blocks are inherently easy to schedule at compile-time, whereas others are not. In this scheme, programs are thus partitioned into low power "static regions" and high power "dynamic regions". Static regions are regions of the program for which the compiler can generate schedules comparable to the dynamic schedules created by the run-time hardware. These regions bypass the dynamic issue units and execute on specially designed low-power, low-complexity hardware.; An extensive evaluation of the proposed scheme reveals that the Hybrid-Scheduling approach wherein instructions are routed to a scheduling engine tuned to a region's characteristics can provide substantial reduction in processor energy consumption while concurrently preserving high levels of performance.