Reducing Access Count to Register-Files through Operand Reuse

摘要

This paper proposes an approach for reducing access count to register-files based on operand data reuse. The key idea is to compare source and destination operands of the current instruction with the corresponding operands of the previous instructions and if they are the same, skip the register file activation during the operand fetch thus saving energy consumption. Simulations show that by using this technique we can decrease the total number of register-file accesses up to 62% on peak and by 39% on average in comparison to a conventional approach with only 3% processor area overhead.