From the earliest and simplest scalar computation engines to modern superscalar out-oforder processors, the evolution of computational machinery during the past century has largely been driven by a single goal: performance. In today’s world of cheap, billion-plus transistor count processors and with an exploding market in mobile computing, a design landscape has emerged where energy efficiency, arguably more than any other single metric, determines the viability of a processor for a given application. The historical emphasis on performance has left modern processors bloated and over provisioned for everyday tasks in the hope that during computationally intensive periods some performance improvement will be observed. This work explores an energy-efficient processor design technique that ensures even a highly over provisioned out-of-order processor has only as many of its computational resources active as it requires for efficient computation at any given time. Specifically, this paper examines the feasibility of a dynamically banked register file and reorder buffer with variable banking policies that enable unused rename registers or reorder buffer entries to be voltage gated (turned off) during execution to save power. The impact of bank placement, turn-off and turn-on policies as well as rail stabilization latencies for this approach are explored for high-performance desktop and server designs as well as low-power mobile processors
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd-2795 |
| Date | 01 January 2011 |
| Creators | Staples, Jacob |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Electronic Theses and Dissertations |
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