A history-based I-cache for low-energy multimedia applications

This paper proposes a history-based tag-comparison scheme for reducing energy consumption of direct-mapped instruction caches. The proposed cache efficiently exploits program-execution footprints recorded in the branch target buffer (BTB), and attempts to detect; and eliminate unnecessary tag checks at run time. Simulation results show that our approach can eliminate up to 95% of tag checks, saving the cache energy by 17%, while affecting the processor performance by only 0.2%.