Design of a GPU Register File Using a Monolithic 3D Technique

While graphics processing units (GPUs) have been widely used to handle large amounts of data in recent years, their significant power consumption causes many usage constraints. Among the many components of a GPU, register files are critical to performance, and the crossbar network to configure them is the most significant factor in power consumption. Currently studied as a way to increase chip aggregation is 3D integration technology, like monolithic 3D (M3D) with finegrain characteristics. We suggest in this study how M3D technology can be applied to the crossbar of GPU register files to reduce power consumption. Our performance analysis shows that we obtain 40.2% and 18.9% savings in dynamic and leakage power, respectively, along with a 64.7% delay reduction.