iMODE (interactive MOod Detection Engine) Processor

Applications change their mood from time to time. A memory-intensive application does not need to be always memory-intensive from its first instruction to its last. Similarly, it is highly usual that a computation-intensive application generates heavy memory traffic at certain points of its entire run. Meanwhile, processors are designed to have a fixed resource configuration, which is expected to serve all kinds of applications with all kinds of program phases. In this paper, we propose the iMODE processor, which tracks down instant mood changes of running applications and apply immediate processor mode changes between in-order and out-of-order modes for either saving power or keeping up with the high-performance demands of applications. In our experiments, we show that the iMODE processor can really track the mood changes of applications in an accurate manner, and achieves 17% power savings with only less than 1% of performance drop, on the average across all simulated benchmarks.