TY - GEN
T1 - Exploiting narrow-width values for thermal-aware register file designs
AU - Shuai, Wang
AU - Jie, Hu
AU - Ziavras, Sotirios G.
AU - Sung, Woo Chung
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:70350077787
SN - 9783981080155
T3 - Proceedings -Design, Automation and Test in Europe, DATE
SP - 1422
EP - 1427
BT - Proceedings - 2009 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE '09
T2 - 2009 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE '09
Y2 - 20 April 2009 through 24 April 2009
ER -