PARE: a power-aware hardware data prefetching engine

Aggressive hardware prefetching often significantly increases energy consumption in the memory system. Experiments show that a major fraction of prefetching related energy degradation is due to the hardware history table related energy costs. In this paper, we present PARE, a PowerAware pRefetching Engine that uses a newly designed indexed hardware history table. Compared to the conventional single table design, the new prefetching table consumes 7-11X less power per access. With the help of compilerbased location-set analysis, we show that the proposed PARE design improves energy consumption by as much as 40% in the data memory systems in 70-nm BTPM processor designs. Categories and Subject Descriptors: B.3.2 [MEMORY STRUCTURES]: Design Styles; C.3 [SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS]. General Terms: Design, Experimentation, Performance.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISLPED
• Authors: Yao Guo, Mahmoud Ben Naser, Csaba Andras Moritz
• Keywords: Energy Consumption, Hardware History Table, ISLPED 2005, Memory Systems