As power dissipation of the register file in modern processor designs tends to dominate, measures must be taken to keep it under control. This paper introduces an approach for reducing the SPARC windowed register file power based on the operation of the Partitioned Register File Inspector added in the decode stage of the pipeline. The power savings show that, when the size of the Register File Inspector is properly fixed, the average saving on the energy consumption of the windowed register file could be up to 77% compared with the traditional register file control scheme.
Published in:
Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2008. ICPADS '08. 14th IEEE International Conference on
Date of Conference: 8-10 Dec. 2008