A history-based I-cache for low-energy multimedia applications
Koji Inoue, Vasily G. Moshnyaga, K. Murakami · 2002
This paper proposes a history-based tag-comparison scheme for reducing energy consumption of direct-mapped instruction caches. The proposed cache efficiently exploits program-execution footprints recorded in the Branch Target Buffer (BTB), and attempts to detect and eliminate unnecessary tag checks at run time. Simulation results show that our approach can eliminate up to 95% of tag checks, saving the cache energy by 17%, while affecting the processor performance by only 0.2%.