Compiler-driven register re-assignment for register file power-density and temperature reduction

Temperature hot-spots have been known to cause severe reliability problems and to significantly increase leakage power. The register file has been previously shown to exhibit the highest temperature compared to all other hardware components in a modern highend embedded processor, which makes it particularly susceptible to faults and elevated leakage power. We show that this is mostly due to the highly clustered register file accesses where a set of few registers physically placed close to each other are accessed with very high frequency. In this paper we propose a compiler-based register reassignment methodology, which purpose is to break such groups of registers and to uniformly distribute the accesses to the register file. This is achieved with no performance and no hardware overheads. We show that the underlying problem is NP-hard, and subsequently introduce an efficient algorithmic heuristic. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.1 [Computer Systems Organization]: Processor Archite...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Xiangrong Zhou, Chenjie Yu, Peter Petrov
• Keywords: Compiler-based Register Reassignment, DAC 2008, Design Automation, Leakage Power, Register File