Wattch: a framework for architectural-level power analysis and optimizations
Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
The Alpha 21264 Microprocessor
IEEE Micro
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
Reducing power density through activity migration
Proceedings of the 2003 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Active bank switching for temperature control of the register file in a microprocessor
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Great Lakes symposium on VLSI
Compiler-driven register re-assignment for register file power-density and temperature reduction
Proceedings of the 45th annual Design Automation Conference
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The manufacturing process of microprocessors becomes increasingly fine and the clock frequency is rapidly growing. Since the corresponding power consumption, however, is not reduced, the power density is increased dramatically. The high temperature and heat generated by the power density causes many problems: malfunction, aging, leakage power and cooling costs. The register file produces the highest temperature in the microprocessor because of extremely high access frequency and its small area. We demonstrated that the traditional renaming unit causes high temperature since it allocates registers imbalanced. Our idea is to redistribute evenly register allocations and accesses across the full range of the register file; consequently, the overall power density is lowered and then the temperature is reduced. The proposed method can be implemented by adding a small logic to the traditional renaming unit with around 1.5% overheads. The results are as follows. Temperature drop was up to 11% on average 6%; leakage power saving was up to 24% on average 13%; performance improvement was up to 103% on average 84%.