Title
Reducing Instruction Translation Look-Aside Buffer Energy Through Compiler-Directed Resizing
Abstract
Power consumption has become a first order design consideration for both the high-performance microprocessors and embedded systems. Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB), which is a small Content Addressable Memory (CAM) structure to assist in mapping virtual addresses to physical addresses, can consume a notable fraction of on-chip power (e.g., 17% on StrongARM SA110) and also has high power density. This paper proposes a novel compiler-directed approach to direct the instruction TLB (iTLB) energy conservation for VLIW processors without compromising performance. The idea is to resize the iTLB dynamically to fit the demands of applications at runtime based on the compiler's analysis. Since only a small portion of iTLB entries are actively accessed during the execution of loops, which typically take long execution time, we propose to resize the iTLB at the loop granularity. Our experiments show that such a strategy can effectively reduce the iTLB energy consumption by 81.3% on average with minimum impact on performance and hardware cost.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1166/jolpe.2006.061
JOURNAL OF LOW POWER ELECTRONICS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Instruction TLB, Energy Consumption, Compiler, Dynamic Resize
Programming language,Resizing,Compiler,Real-time computing,Engineering,Aside
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2
2
1546-1998
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bramha Allu1121.88
Wei Zhang216311.75