Underclocked Software Prefetching: More Cores, Less Energy

Power consumption is a concern for helper-thread prefetching that uses extra cores to speed up the single-thread execution, because power consumption increases with each additional core. This article analyzes the impact of using power-saving techniques in the context of intercore prefetching (ICP), and shows that dynamic frequency scaling coupled with ICP is a more energy-efficient way to improve the single-thread execution.