CS 7810 Lecture 13
Pipeline Gating: Speculation Control For Energy Reduction
S. Manne, A. Klauser, D. GrunwaldProceedings of ISCA-25
June 1998
Cost of Speculation
9.9 12.2 23.9 10.4 6.9 4.6 11.3 1.7Mispredict rates
Pipeline Gating
• Low confidence branches throttle instr fetch until they are resolved
• Pipeline gating usually lasts for fewer than five cycles
Metrics
• SPEC (specificity): fraction of all mispredicted branches detected as low-confidence by the confidence estimator (coverage)
• PVN (predictive value of a negative test): probability of a low-confidence branch being incorrectly branch-predicted (accuracy)
Confidence Estimators
• Perfect: to gauge potential benefits
• Static: branches that have low prediction rates
• JRS: if a branch has yielded N successive correct predictions, it has high confidence
• Saturating counters: unbiased counter value or disagreement in two predictors low confidence
• Distance: mpreds are clustered, hence the first 4 branches after a mispredict have low confidence
SPEC and PVN
• It is easier to achieve a high SPEC value than PVN• A high PVN value can be achieved by using N low-confidence branches to invoke gating – if PVN is 30%, re-defining low-confidence as two low-confidence branches increases PVN to 51%
SPEC (coverage): mispred branches detected by low-confidence estimatorPVN (accuracy): % of low-confidence branches that are branch mpreds
Perfect
Gating Results
Results
• Can gating improve performance? – only if cache pollution is significant
• Less than 1% performance loss and up to 38% reduction in extra work
• Energy consumption could go up – some work is independent of number of executed instrs (clock distribution) – incr. execution time can incr. Energy
• Pipeline gating should reduce power consumption
Results
CS 7810 Lecture 13
Cache Decay: Exploiting Generational Behaviorto Reduce Cache Leakage Power
S. Kaxiras, Z. Hu, M. MartonosiProceedings of ISCA-28
July 2001
Leakage Power Trends
• Circuit delay 1/(V – Vth)
• Leakage num transistors (incr) supply voltage (decr) (exp) low thresh. voltage (incr)
• L1 and L2 caches are the biggest contributors (high transistor budgets)
Vdd-Gating
• Leakage can be reduced by gating off the supply voltage to the circuit
• When applied to a cache, the contents of the SRAM cell are lost
• Cache decay: apply Vdd-gating when you do not care about cache contents
Lifetime of a Cache Line
Overheads
• Hardware to determine when to decay
• Introduces additional cache misses
• Normalized cache leakage power = Activeratio (fraction of cache that is powered on) + (Counter overhead : Leak) x activity + (L2 access energy : Leak) x num-misses
• Increased execution time (< 0.7%)
• L2 access/leakage ratio is ~9
Skier’s Dilemma
New skis: $400 Ski rentals: $20
Heuristic: Buy skis after rental cost = purchase price
Ski trips: 5 10 15 20 25 50Optimal: $100 $200 $300 $400 $400 $400Heuristic: $100 $200 $300 $800 $800 $800
Likewise, decay a cache line when the cost of anadditional miss equals leakage dissipated so far
Tracking Dead Time
• Each line has a 2-bit counter that gets reset on every access and gets incremented every 2500 cycles through a global signal (negligible overhead)
• After 10,000 clock cycles, the counter reaches the max value and triggers a decay
• Adaptive decay: Start with a short decay period; if you have a quick miss, double the period; if there is no miss, halve the period
Results
Overheads
Other Results
• L2 cache is equally suitable to decay techniques -- lifetimes are scaled by a factor of 10, an extra miss also costs a lot more
• For their experiments, there is little interference from multiprogramming
• Some instructions can easily be identified as last touches to a cache block – potential for early cache decay
• Can this apply to bpred, register file?
Title
• Bullet
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