MLP-Aware Instruction Queue Resizing: The Key to Power-Efficient Performance

Several techniques aiming to improve power-efficiency (measured as EDP) in out-of-order cores trade energy with performance. Prime exam ples are the techniques to resize the instruction queue (IQ). While most of them produce good results, they fail to take into account that changing the timing of memory accesses can have significant consequences on the memo ry-level parallelism (MLP) of the application and thus incur disproportional performance degradation. We propose a novel mechanism that deals with this realization by collecting fine-grain information about the maximum IQ resiz ing that does not affect the MLP of the program. This information is used to override the resizing enforced by feedback mechanisms when this resizing might reduce MLP. We compare our technique to a previously proposed non-MLP-aware management technique and our results show a significant in crease in EDP savings for most benchmarks of the SPEC2000 suite.

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