Some traditional optimizations improve the performance of pro-cessors, but consume the higher power dissipation. We study this trade-off using software prefetching as performance-oriented optimization technique. We first demonstrate that software prefetching provides a significant performance boost with the higher power on several memory-intensive benchmarks. However, when we combine software prefetching with dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS), the performance gain can be achieved without power increase, which is called a power-aware approach. Besides reducing power dissipation through DVFS, we also improve the performance through adjusting the prefetch distance. A modified SimpleScalar/Wattch is used to evaluate our power-aware software prefetching. Experimental results show this optimization approach is effective to guarantee no power increase due to prefetching and improve the performance of software prefetching.
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