Exploring the Potential of Architecture-Level Power Optimizations

This paper examines the limits of microprocessor energy reduction available via certain classes of architecture-level optimization. It focuses on three sources of waste that consume energy. The first is the execution of instructions that are unnecessary for correct program execution. The second source of wasted power is speculation waste – waste due to speculative execution of instructions that do not commit their results. The third source is architectural waste. This comes from suboptimal sizing of processor structures. This study shows that when these sources of waste are eliminated, processor energy has the potential to be reduced by 55% and 52% for the integer and floating point benchmarks respectively.