The SimpleScalar tool set, version 2.0
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
Confidence estimation for speculation control
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Pipeline gating: speculation control for energy reduction
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
MiBench: A free, commercially representative embedded benchmark suite
WWC '01 Proceedings of the Workload Characterization, 2001. WWC-4. 2001 IEEE International Workshop
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Modern embedded processors use small and simple branch predictors to improve performance. Using complex and accurate branch predictors, while desirable, is not possible as such predictors impose high power and area overhead which is not affordable in an embedded processor. As a result, for some applications, misprediction rate can be high. Such mispredictions result in energy wasted down the mispredicted path. We introduce area-aware and low-complexity pipeline gating mechanisms to reduce energy lost to possible branch mispredictions in embedded processors. We show that by using a simple gating mechanism which comes with 33-bit area overhead, on average, we can reduce the number of executed instructions by 17% (max: 30%) while paying a negligible performance cost (average 1.1%).