Analytical energy dissipation models for low-power caches
ISLPED '97 Proceedings of the 1997 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
The filter cache: an energy efficient memory structure
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
A 160-MHz, 32-b, 0.5-W CMOS RISC microprocessor
Digital Technical Journal
Pipeline gating: speculation control for energy reduction
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
A low power SRAM using auto-backgate-controlled MT-CMOS
ISLPED '98 Proceedings of the 1998 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Fundamentals of modern VLSI devices
Fundamentals of modern VLSI devices
Technology and design challenges for low power and high performance
ISLPED '99 Proceedings of the 1999 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Selective cache ways: on-demand cache resource allocation
Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Gated-Vdd: a circuit technique to reduce leakage in deep-submicron cache memories
ISLPED '00 Proceedings of the 2000 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Drowsy caches: simple techniques for reducing leakage power
ISCA '02 Proceedings of the 29th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Basic Block Distribution Analysis to Find Periodic Behavior and Simulation Points in Applications
Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques
Temperature-aware microarchitecture
Proceedings of the 30th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
On the Limits of Leakage Power Reduction in Caches
HPCA '05 Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
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Various architectural power reduction techniques have been proposed for on-chip caches in the last decade. In this paper, we first show that these power reduction techniques can be suboptimal when thermal effects are considered. Then, we propose a thermal-aware cache power-down technique that minimizes the power density of the active parts by turning off alternating rows of memory cells instead of entire banks. The decrease in the power density lowers the temperature, which then exponentially reduces the leakage. Thus, leakage power of the active parts is reduced in addition to the power eliminated from the parts that are turned off. Simulations based on SPEC2000, NetBench, and MediaBench applications in a 70-nm technology show that the proposed thermal-aware architecture can reduce the total energy consumption by 53% compared to a conventional cache, and 14% compared to a cache architecture with thermal-unaware power reduction scheme. Second, we show a block permutation scheme that can be used during the design of the caches to maximize the distance between blocks with consecutive addresses. Because of spatial locality, blocks with consecutive addresses are likely to be accessed within a short time interval. By maximizing the distance between such blocks, we minimize the power density of the hot spots in the cache, and hence reduce the peak temperature. This, in return, results in an average leakage power reduction of 8.7% compared to a conventional cache without affecting the dynamic power and the latency. Overall, both of our architectures add no extra run-time penalty compared to the thermal-unaware power reduction schemes, yet they result in a significant reduction in the total energy consumption of a cache.