LRU-SEQ: A Novel Replacement Policy for Transition Energy Reduction in Instruction Caches

Leakage energy will be the major energy consumer in future deep sub-micron designs. Especially the memory sub-system of future SOCs will be negatively affected by this trend. In order to reduce the leakage energy, memory banks are transitioned to a low-energy state when possible. This transition itself costs some energy which is termed as the transition energy. In this paper we present, as the first approach of its kind, a novel energy saving replacement policy called LRU-SEQ for instruction caches. Evaluation of the policy on various architectures in a system-level environment has shown that upto 23% energy savings can be obtained. Considering the negligible hardware impact, LRU-SEQ offers a viable choice for an energy saving policy.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Praveen Kalla, Xiaobo Sharon Hu, Jörg Henkel
• Keywords: Energy Saving Policy, Energy Saving Replacement, Hardware, ICCAD 2003, Upto 23% Energy