Energy-Efficient Instruction Scheduling Utilizing Cache Miss Information

摘要

Current microprocessors require both high performance and low-power consumption. In order to reduce energy consumption with maintaining computing performance, we propose to utilize the information regarding instruction criticality. Microprocessors we are proposing have two types of functional units distinguished in terms of their execution latency and power consumption. Only critical instructions are executed on power-hungry functional units, and thus the total energy consumption can be reduced without severe performance loss. In order to achieve large energy reduction, it is required to execute instructions on power-efficient units as frequently as possible. In this paper, we propose a new instruction scheduling method utilizing cache miss information over the above mentioned scheduling technique. As a performance gap between microprocessors and main memories is increasing, it is possible that critical instructions are executed in power-efficient units as well as non-critical ones while main memory access is occurring. Our simulation results reveal that the modified instruction scheduling achieves 27.3% ED~2P reduction with 1.4% performance degradation.