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Euromicro Symposium on Digital System Design (DSD'04)
What to Adapt in a High-Performance Microprocessor
Rennes, France
August 31-September 03
ISBN: 0-7695-2203-3
Pedro Trancoso, University of Cyprus
High-performance processors usually require large amounts of power for their operation. Adapting resources in such processors is very relevant as each application and distinct use of the system has a different demand. A frequent use of adaptationis to have the processor operating in either high-performance or low-power mode.
In this work we analyze how power and performance change while modifying most of the resources in a processor. This leads to identifyingwhich resources are more important for adaptation. This analysis was performed for three distinct workloads: multimedia, scientific, and database. Four criteria were defined to limit the adaptation range considering the cost and/or the efficiency of the system.
The results of our experiments showed that the resource to be adapted depends on the: (1) operating mode (e.g. low-power or high-performance), (2) the workload, and (3) the criteria. Overall, for our baseline processor configuration, the dominant resources to be adapted are the voltage-frequency and the first-level instruction cache. Adapting resources may lead to an increase in the performance by up to 44% or a reduction in power by up to 93% with no restrictions. For configurations of the same cost and efficiency as the baseline, adaptation of resources may improve the performance by 33% or reduce the power by 34%.
Citation:
Pedro Trancoso, "What to Adapt in a High-Performance Microprocessor," dsd, pp.556-563, Euromicro Symposium on Digital System Design (DSD'04), 2004
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