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 Citations (Scopus)

    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
    Title of host publicationProceedings - 2009 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE '09
    Pages1422-1427
    Number of pages6
    Publication statusPublished - 2009
    Event2009 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition, DATE '09 - Nice, France
    Duration: 2009 Apr 202009 Apr 24

    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
    Period09/4/2009/4/24

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • General Engineering

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Exploiting narrow-width values for thermal-aware register file designs'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this