The unique characteristics of multimedia/embedded applications dictate media-sensitive architectural and compiler approaches to reduce the power consumption of the data cache. Our goal is exploring energy savings for embedded/multimedia workloads without sacrificing performance. Here, we present two complementary media-sensitive energy-saving techniques that leverage static information. While our first technique is applicable to existing architectures, in our second technique we adopt a more radical approach and propose a new tagless caching architecture by reevaluating the architecture--compiler interface.Our experiments show that substantial energy savings are possible in the data cache. Across a wide range of cache and architectural configurations, we obtain up to 77p energy savings, while the performance varies from 14p improvement to 4p degradation depending on the application.
['Osman S. Unsal', 'Raksit Ashok', 'Israel Koren', 'C. Mani Krishna', 'Csaba Andras Moritz']
Cool-Cache: A compiler-enabled energy efficient data caching framework for embedded/multimedia processors