Limits of instruction-level parallelism
ASPLOS IV Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Complexity-effective superscalar processors
Proceedings of the 24th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Wattch: a framework for architectural-level power analysis and optimizations
Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Focusing processor policies via critical-path prediction
ISCA '01 Proceedings of the 28th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Instruction flow-based front-end throttling for power-aware high-performance processors
ISLPED '01 Proceedings of the 2001 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Reducing power with dynamic critical path information
Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
Power-Aware Control Speculation through Selective Throttling
HPCA '03 Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on High-Performance 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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We study the delays faced by instructions in the pipeline of a superscalar processor and its impact on power and performance. Instructions that are ready-on-dispatch (ROD) are normally delayed in the issue stage due to resource constraints even though their data dependencies are satisfied. These delays are reduced by issuing ROD instructions earlier than normal and executing them on slow functional units to obtain power benefits. This scheme achieves around 6% to 8% power reduction with average performance degradation of about 2%. Alternatively, instead of reducing the delays faced by instructions in the pipeline, increasing them by deliberately stalling certain instructions at appropriate times minimizes the duration for which the processor is underutilized leading to 2.5-4% power savings with less than 0.3% performance degradation.