21st International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSI Design 2008)
Stall Power Reduction in Pipelined Architecture Processors
Hyderabad, India
January 04-January 08
ISBN: 0-7695-3083-4
This paper proposes a technique for dynamic power reduction of pipelined processors. Pipelined processors frequently insert NOP instruction to the pipe for generating delay or resolving dependency. Our study shows that the percentage of power consumed by NOP instructions in a pipelined processor is significant. This article studies the detail behavior of NOP instruction and proposes a technique for eliminating unnecessary transitions that are generated during execution of NOP instructions. Initial results demonstrate up to 10% reduction in power consumption for some benchmarks at a cost of negligible performance (almost zero) and area overhead (below 0.1%).
Citation:
Pejman Lotfi-Kamran, Amir-Mohammad Rahmani, Ali-Asghar Salehpour, Ali Afzali-Kusha, Zainalabedin Navabi, "Stall Power Reduction in Pipelined Architecture Processors," vlsid, pp.541-546, 21st International Conference on VLSI Design (VLSI Design 2008), 2008