Title
Improving power efficiency with compiler-assisted cache replacement
Abstract
Data cache in embedded systems plays the roles of both speeding up program execution and reducing power consumption. However, a hardware-only cache management scheme usually results in unsatisfactory cache utilization. In several new architectures, cache management details are accessible at instruction level, enabling the involvement of compiler for better cache performance. In particular, Intel XScale implemented the cache-locking mechanism, which enables the compiler to lock certain critical data in the cache and it is guaranteed that the locked data will not be evicted from the cache. In such an architecture, what-to-lock and when-to-lock are important issues to achieve good cache performance. To this end, this paper gives a 0/1 knapsack problem formulation, which can be efficiently solved using a dynamic programming algorithm. We implemented this formulation in the MIPSpro compiler and our approach reduces both execution time and power consumption. The measured power and performance on an Xscale processor show that our method can achieve improved execution time than data prefetching at similar or reduced power consumption.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.5555/1233791.1233796
J. Embedded Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
low power,cache management,compiler-assisted cache replacement,improving power efficiency,power consumption,index terms— compiler optimization,good cache performance,knapsack problem,certain critical data,locked data,measured power,data cache,unsatisfactory cache utilization,better cache performance,intel xscale,hardware-only cache management scheme,cache management detail,power efficiency,embedded system,embedded processor,dynamic programming algorithm,compiler optimization,indexing terms
Cache-oblivious algorithm,Cache invalidation,Cache pollution,Cache,Computer science,Parallel computing,Real-time computing,Page cache,Cache algorithms,Cache coloring,Smart Cache,Operating system
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
1
4
5
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.46
12
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hongbo Yang1553.49
R. Govindarajan225021.81
Guang R. Gao32661265.87
Ziang Hu421714.98