| The microprocessor industry has started viewing power, along with area and performance, as a decisive design factor in today's microprocessors. The increasing cost of packaging and cooling systems poses stringent requirements on the maximum allowable power dissipation. Most of the research in recent years has focused on the circuit, gate, and register-transfer (RT) levels of the design. In this research, we focus on the software running on a microprocessor and we view the program as a power consumer. Our work concentrates on the role of the compiler in the construction of “power-efficient” code, and especially its interaction with the hardware so that unnecessary processor activity is saved. We propose techniques that use extra hardware features and compiler-driven code transformations that specifically target activity reduction in certain parts of the CPU which are known to be large power and energy consumers.; Design for low power/energy at this level of abstraction entails larger energy gains than in the lower stages of the design hierarchy in which the design team has already made the most important design commitments. The role of the compiler in generating code which exploits the processor organization is also fundamental in energy minimization. Hence, we propose a hardware/software co-design paradigm, and we show what code transformations are necessary by the compiler so that “wasted” power in a modern microprocessor can be trimmed.; More specifically, we propose a technique that uses an additional mini cache located between the instruction cache (I-Cache) and the CPU core; the mini cache buffers instructions that are nested within loops and are continuously fetched from the I-Cache. This mechanism can create very substantial energy savings, since the I-Cache unit is one of the main power consumers in most of today's high-performance microprocessors. Results are reported for the SPEC95 benchmarks in the R-4400 processor which implements the MIPS2 instruction set architecture. |
