A power-aware technique for functional units in high-performance processors

Abstract

This paper presents a hardware technique to reduce the static and dynamic power consumption in functional units of a 64-bit superscalar processor. Our approach is based on substituting some of the 64-bit power-hungry adders by others with 32-bit lower power-consumption adders, and modifying the protocol in order to issue as much instructions as possible to those low power-consumption units incurring a negligible performance penalty. Our technique saves between 14.7% and a 50% of the power-consumption in the adders which is between 6.1% and a 20% of power-consumption in the execution units. This reduction is important because it can avoid the creation of a hot spot on the functional units

Publication
9textsuperscriptth EUROMICRO Conference on Digital System Design (DSD'06)
J. Manuel Colmenar
J. Manuel Colmenar
Full Professor

My research interests are focused on metaheuristics applied to optimization problems. I have worked on different combinatorial optimization problems applying trajectorial algorithms such us GRASP or VNS. Besides, I am very interested in applications of Grammatical Evolution, specifically in model and prediction domain, as alternative to machine learning approaches.