A circuit level implementation of an adaptive issue queue for power-aware microprocessors

Citation:

Alper Buyuktosunoglu, David Albonesi, Stanley Schuster, David Brooks, Pradip Bose, and Peter Cook. 3/2001. “A circuit level implementation of an adaptive issue queue for power-aware microprocessors.” In Proceedings of the 11th Great Lakes symposium on VLSI, Pp. 73–78. ACM. Publisher's Version

Abstract:

Increasing power dissipation has become a major constraint for future per~brmartce gains in the design of microproces- sors. In this paper, we present the circuit design of an issue queue for a superscalar processor that leverages transmis- sion gate insertion to provide dynamic low-cost configura- bility of size and speed. A novel circuit structure dynami- cally gathers statistics of issue queue activity over intervals of instruction execution. These statistics are then used to change the size of an issue queue organization on-the-fly to improve issue queue energy and performance. When applied to a fixed, full-size issue queue structure, the result is up to a 70% reduction in energy dissipation. The complexity of the additional circuitry to achieve this result is almost neg- ligible. Furthermore, self-timed techniques embedded in the adaptive scheme can provide a 56% decrease in cycle time of the CAM array read of the issue queue when we change the adaptive issue queue size f¥om 32 entries (largest possible) to 8 entries (smallest possible in our design). 
Last updated on 05/06/2022