Extensive research has been done in prefetching techniques that hide memory latency in microprocessors leading to performance improvements. However, the energy aspect of prefetching is relatively unknown. While aggressive prefetching techniques often help to improve performance, they increase energy consumption by as much as 30% in the memory system. This paper provides a detailed evaluation on the energy impact of hardware data prefetching and then presents a set of new energy-aware techniques to overcome prefetching energy overhead of such schemes. These include compiler-assisted and hardware-based energy-aware techniques and a new power-aware prefetch engine that can reduce hardware prefetching related energy consumption by 7-11 ×. Combined with the effect of leakage energy reduction due to performance improvement, the total energy consumption for the memory system after the application of these techniques can be up to 12% less than the baseline with no prefetching.

This paper evaluates several hardware-based data prefetching techniques from an energy perspective, and explores their energy/performance tradeoffs. We present detailed simulation results and make performance and energy comparisons between different configurations. Power characterization is provided based on HSpice circuit-level simulation of state-of-the-art low-power cache designs implemented in deep-submicron process technology. This is combined with architecture-level simulation of switching activities in the memory system. The results show that while aggressive prefetching techniques often help to improve performance, they increase energy consumption in most of the cases. In designs implemented in deep-submicron 100-nm BPTM process technology, cache leakage becomes one of the dominant factors of the energy consumption. We have, however, found that if leakage is optimized with recently-proposed circuit-level techniques, most of the energy degradation is due to prefetch-hardware related costs and unnecessary L1 data cache lookups related to prefetches that hit in the L1 cache. This overhead on the memory system can be as much as 20%.

This article presents Cool-Mem, a family of memory system architectures that integrate conventional memory system mechanisms, energy-aware address translation, and compiler-enabled cache disambiguation techniques, to reduce energy consumption in general-purpose architectures. The solutions provided in this article leverage on interlayer tradeoffs between architecture, compiler, and operating system layers. Cool-Mem achieves power reduction by statically matching memory operations with energy-efficient cache and virtual memory access mechanisms. It combines statically speculative cache access modes, a dynamic content addressable memory-based (CAM-based) Tag-Cache used as backup for statically mispredicted accesses, different conventional multilevel associative cache organizations, embedded protection checking along all cache access mechanisms, as well as architectural organizations to reduce the power consumed by address translation in virtual memory. Because it is based on speculative static information, a superset of the predictable program information available at compile-time, our approach removes the burden of provable correctness in compiler analysis passes that extract static information. This makes Cool-Mem highly practical, applicable for large and complex applications, without having any limitations due to complexity issues in our compiler passes or the presence of precompiled static libraries. Based on extensive evaluation, for both SPEC2000 and Mediabench applications, we obtain from 6% to 19% total energy savings in the processor, with performance ranging from 1.5% degradation to 6% improvement, for the applications studied. We have also compared Cool-Mem to several prior arts and have found Cool-Mem to perform better in almost all cases.

This paper presents Cool-Mem, a family of memory system architectures that integrate conventional memory system mechanisms, energy-aware address translation, and compiler-enabled cache disambiguation techniques, to reduce energy consumption in general purpose architectures. It combines statically speculative cache access modes, a dynamic CAM based Tag-Cache used as backup for statically mispredicted accesses, various conventional multi-level associative cache organizations, embedded protection checking along all cache access mechanisms, as well as architectural organizations to reduce the power consumed by address translation in virtual memory. Because it is based on speculative static information, the approach removes the burden of provable correctness in compiler analysis passes that extract static information. This makes Cool-Mem applicable for large and complex applications, without having any limitations due to complexity issues in the compiler passes or the presence of precompiled static libraries. Based on extensive evaluation, for both SPEC2000 and Mediabench applications, 12% to 20% total energy savings are obtained in the processor, with performance ranging from 1.2% degradation to 8% improvement, for the applications studied.