Improving energy-efficiency in high-performance processors by bypassing trivial instructions
Ehsan Atoofian, Amirali Baniasadi · IEE Proceedings - Computers and Digital Techniques · 2006
Energy-efficiency benefits of bypassing trivial computations in high-performance processors are studied. Trivial computations are those computations whose output can be determined without performing the computation. Bypassing trivial instructions reduces energy consumption while improving performance. The present study shows that by bypassing trivial instructions and for the subset of SPEC'2K and MiBench benchmarks studied here, it is possible to improve energy and energy-delay up to 15.6 and 30.6%, respectively, in an optimistic scenario and by 10.8 and 21.7% in a pessimistic scenario, over a conventional processor.