Dynamically Exploiting Narrow Width Operands to Improve Processor Power and Performance

In general-purpose microprocessors, recent trends have pushed towards 64-bit word widths, primarily to accommodate the large addressing needs of some programs. Many integer problems, however, rarely need the full 64-bit dynamic range these CPUs provide. In fact, another recent instruction set trend has been increased support for sub-word operations (that is, manipulating data in quantities less than the full word size). In particular, most major processor families have introduced "multimedia" instruction set extensions that operate in parallel on several sub-word quantities in the same ALU. This paper notes that across the SPECint95 benchmarks, over half of the integer operation executions require 16 bits or less. With this as motivation, our work proposes hardware mechanisms that dynamically recognize and capitalize on these "narrow-bitwidth" instances. Both optimizations require little additional hardware, and neither requires compiler support. The first, power-o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: David Brooks, Margaret Martonosi
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCA 1999, Integer, Integer Operations, Many Integer Problems