Stride directed prefetching in scalar processors
MICRO 25 Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Microarchitecture
MediaBench: a tool for evaluating and synthesizing multimedia and communicatons systems
MICRO 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
ISCA '90 Proceedings of the 17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture
Power-efficient prefetching via bit-differential offset assignment on embedded processors
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED conference on Languages, compilers, and tools for embedded systems
AC/DC: An Adaptive Data Cache Prefetcher
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques
Energy Characterization of Hardware-Based Data Prefetching
ICCD '04 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Design
MicroLib: A Case for the Quantitative Comparison of Micro-Architecture Mechanisms
Proceedings of the 37th annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
Data Cache Prefetching Using a Global History Buffer
HPCA '04 Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
Accurate and Complexity-Effective Spatial Pattern Prediction
HPCA '04 Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
PARE: a power-aware hardware data prefetching engine
ISLPED '05 Proceedings of the 2005 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Measuring the gap between FPGAs and ASICs
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/SIGDA 14th international symposium on Field programmable gate arrays
HPCA '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE 13th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture
Prefetching in Embedded Mobile Systems Can Be Energy-Efficient
IEEE Computer Architecture Letters
Energy-Constrained prefetching optimization in embedded applications
EUC'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing
Energy-aware data prefetching for general-purpose programs
PACS'04 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Power-Aware Computer Systems
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Energy efficiency is the most important concern in mobile embedded system design. The conventional wisdom is that there is a tradeoff between energy efficiency and high-performance techniques, such as prefetching. Thus to reduce energy consumption and save chip area, hardware prefetchers are not implemented in most existing embedded mobile systems. However, modern embedded mobile systems have become increasingly powerful and show a great deal of demand for applying high-performance techniques, such as hardware prefetching, to accelerate applications. In this paper, we study whether it would be beneficial to implement hardware prefetchers in embedded mobile systems. We first demonstrate that: contrary to the conventional wisdom, as technology advances (e.g. from 90nm to 32nm), prefetching starts to become energy-efficient while improving performance. Then, we introduce a general analytical model to identify the conditions for prefetching techniques to achieve energy efficiency. Furthermore, we also introduce a series of models to evaluate the energy efficiency of the prefetcher when specific prefetching features are employed. By using these models, system designers can easily and accurately evaluate the energy efficiency of their designs and make decisions on the deployment of hardware prefetchers.