Expoiting Critical Data Regions to Reduce Data Cache Energy Consumption
Ananda Vardhan, Y.N. Srikant
In this report, we address the problem of power consumption
in a data cache by focusing on the latency tolerance of
data regions. Latency tolerance of a data region indicates
how critical the data region to the overall performance of
the program. We use a profile- based technique focusing on
context-as well as path-sensitive analysis to identify critical
and non-critical data regions. We deploy criticality analysis
to drive a power-aware optimization technique which allocated
a split data cache, operating in normal and drowsy
modes, to critical and non-critical data regions respectively.
This technique saves around 30% of total power and 20%
of leakage power in the data cache without any significant
performance penalty.
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