Exploiting narrow-width values for thermal-aware register file designs

Wang Shuai, Hu Jie, Sotirios G. Ziavras, Woo Chung Sung

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Localized heating-up creates thermal hotspots across the chip, with the integer register file ranked as the hottest unit in high-performance microprocessors. In this paper, we perform a detailed study on the thermal behavior of a low-power value-aware register file (VARF) that is subjected to internal fine-grain hotspots. To further optimize its thermal behavior, we propose and evaluate three thermal-aware control schemes, thermal sensor (TS), access counter (AC), and register-id (ID) based, to balance the access activity and thus the temperature across different partitions in the VARF. The simulation results using SPEC CINT2000 benchmarks show that the register-id controlled VARF (ID-VARF) scheme achieves optimized thermal behavior at minimum cost as compared to the other schemes. We further evaluate the performance impact of the thermal-aware VARF design with the dynamic thermal management (DTM). The experimental results show that the ID-VARF can improve the performance by 26.1% and 7.2% over the conventional register file and the original VARF design, respectively.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2009 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE '09
Pages1422-1427
Number of pages6
StatePublished - 2009
Event2009 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE '09 - Nice, France
Duration: Apr 20 2009Apr 24 2009

Publication series

NameProceedings -Design, Automation and Test in Europe, DATE
ISSN (Print)1530-1591

Other

Other2009 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE '09
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityNice
Period4/20/094/24/09

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

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