An Energy-Efficient BTB Lookup Scheme for Embedded Processors

In this brief, we propose an energy-efficient branch target buffer (BTB) lookup scheme for the embedded processors. Unlike the traditional scheme in which the BTB has to be looked up every instruction fetch, in our design, the BTB is only looked up when the instruction is likely to be a taken branch. By dynamically profiling the taken traces during program execution, the new scheme can achieve the goal of one BTB lookup per taken trace. The experimental results show that, by filtering out the redundant lookups, our design can reduce the total processor energy consumption by about 5.24% on average for the MediaBench applications