Compiler directed issue queue energy reduction

Abstract

The issue logic of a superscalar processor consumes a large amount of static and dynamic energy. Furthermore, its power density makes it a hot-spot requiring expensive cooling systems and additional packaging. This paper presents a novel approach to energy reduction that uses compiler analysis communicated to the hardware, allowing the processor to dynamically resize the issue queue, fitting it to the available ILP without slowing down the critical path. Limiting the entries available reduces the quantity of instructions dispatched, leading to energy savings in the banked issue queue without adversely affecting performance. Compared with a recently proposed hardware scheme, our approach is faster, simpler and saves more energy. A simplistic scheme achieves 31% dynamic and 33% static energy savings in the issue queue with a 7.2% performance loss. Using more sophisticated compiler analysis we then show that the performance loss can be reduced to less than 0.6% with 24% dynamic and 30% static energy savings and an EDD product of 0.96, outperforming two current state-of-the-art hardware approaches. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.