arch-beerWeekly Reading |
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Mrinmoy is presenting... Dry run: Job Talk Topic: Microarchitectural Techniques to Reduce Energy Consumption in the Memory Hierarchy The increasing complexity and shrinking feature size of modern microprocessors has caused energy consumption to become a critical design constraint. The demands of the working-set size from increasingly complex applications has led to ever-larger on-chip caches with a slew of read/write ports making it a major consumer of on-chip power. Apart from caches, other components of the memory hierarchy like DRAM also contribute significantly to the power consumption of the overall system. This talk will present research aimed at addressing different segments of the power consumption problem at different levels of the memory hierarchy. Several simple and implementable ideas to reduce dynamic power in caches, leakage power in higher-level caches, and refresh power of DRAM were developed as a part of this research. Emphasis was given on several techniques of getting energy savings using a simple hardware structure called the Counting Bloom filter. This talk will focus on two different techniques. One of the techniques reduces redundant refreshes in a DRAM using countdown counters. This simple technique reduced refresh energy of a DRAM by 45%, saving 9% of total DRAM energy. The second technique introduces a Counting Bloom Filter and presents a couple of simple techniques to reduce dynamic and static power in SRAM Caches using a Counting Bloom Filter. |