Mobile Ecosystem Driven Dynamic Pipeline Adaptation for Low Power

State-of-the-art mobile smartphone and tablet processors are beginning to employ fully speculative, out-of-order architectures with deep instruction pipelines. These processors often have pipeline lengths of 24 or more stages. Furthermore, to improve high-performance ILP, these processors provide multiple parallel pipeline paths for various instruction types. These architectures provide multiple execution clusters defined by instruction type, each with its own issue queue. Instructions are dispatched to one of the appropriate issue queues, and all issue queues are then scanned in parallel to identify instructions ready for execution. The goal of such a resource-intensive architectural design is to sustain peak processor performance. Unfortunately, applications oftentimes only leverage a small subset of these robust computation resources, and the excess hardware resources still consume power while idle. This paper proposes a novel methodology that leverages the unique characteristics o...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: ARCS
• Authors: Garo Bournoutian, Alex Orailoglu
• Keywords: ARCS 2015, Software Engineering