A simple mechanism to adapt leakage-control policies to temperature

Leakage power reduction in cache memories continues to be a critical area of research because of the promise of a significant pay-off. Various techniques have been developed so far that can be broadly categorized into state-preserving (e.g., Drowsy Caches) and non-state preserving (e.g., Cache Decay). Decay saves more leakage but also incurs dynamic power overhead in the form of induced misses. Previous work has shown that depending on the leakage vs. dynamic power trade-off, one or the other technique can be better. Several factors such as cache architecture, technology parameters and temperature, affect this trade-off. Our work proposes the first mechanism —to the best of our knowledge— that takes into account temperature in adjusting the leakage control policy at run time. At very low temperatures, leakage is relatively weak so the need to tightly control it is not as important as the need to minimize extra dynamic power (e.g., decay-induced misses) or performance loss. We use ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ISLPED
• Authors: Stefanos Kaxiras, Polychronis Xekalakis, Georgios Keramidas
• Keywords: Cache, Decay Mode, Dynamic Power, ISLPED 2005