Power-Efficient Wakeup Tag Broadcast

The dynamic instruction scheduling logic is one of the most critical components of modern superscalar microprocessors, both from the delay and power dissipation standpoints. The delay and energy requirement of driving the wakeup tags across the associatively-addressed issue queue accounts for a significant percentage of the scheduler’s overhead and also limits the design scalability. We propose Tag Memoization and Tagline Folding - two schemes to reduce the power of wakeup tag broadcasts by reducing the number of tag-bits that are driven in each broadcast. Our results show that the combination of these mechanisms provides 22.3% average reduction of the wakeup tag broadcast power with no impact on the IPC.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: Joseph J. Sharkey, Kanad Ghose, Dmitry V. Ponomarev, Oguz Ergin
• Keywords: Hardware, ICCD 2005, Power Dissipation Standpoints, Wakeup Tag Broadcast, Wakeup Tag Broadcasts