Active bank switching for temperature control of the register file in a microprocessor

ABSTRACT

An effective thermal management scheme, called active bank switching, for temperature control in the register file of a microprocessor is presented. The idea is to divide the physical register file into two equal-sized banks, and to alternate between the two banks when allocating new registers to the instruction operands. Experimental results show that this periodic active bank switching scheme achieves 3.4°C of steady-state temperature reduction, with a mere 0.75% average performance penalty.

REFERENCES

• 1: David Brooks , Margaret Martonosi, Dynamic Thermal Management for High-Performance Microprocessors, Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, p.171, January 20-24, 2001
• 2: Hector Sanchez , Belli Kuttanna , Tim Olson , Mike Alexander , Gian Gerosa , Ross Philip , Jose Alvarez, Thermal Management System for High Performance PowerPCTM Microprocessors, Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE International Computer Conference, p.325, February 23-26, 1997
• 3: Seongmoo Heo , Kenneth Barr , Krste Asanović, Reducing power density through activity migration, Proceedings of the 2003 international symposium on Low power electronics and design, August 25-27, 2003, Seoul, Korea [doi>10.1145/871506.871561]
• 4: Jayanth Srinivasan , Sarita V. Adve, Predictive dynamic thermal management for multimedia applications, Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Supercomputing, June 23-26, 2003, San Francisco, CA, USA [doi>10.1145/782814.782831]
• 5: Kevin Skadron , Mircea R. Stan , Wei Huang , Sivakumar Velusamy , Karthik Sankaranarayanan , David Tarjan, Temperature-aware microarchitecture, Proceedings of the 30th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, June 09-11, 2003, San Diego, California
• 6: Kevin Skadron, Hybrid Architectural Dynamic Thermal Management, Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe, p.10010, February 16-20, 2004
• 7: Kevin Skadron , Tarek Abdelzaher , Mircea R. Stan, Control-Theoretic Techniques and Thermal-RC Modeling for Accurate and Localized Dynamic Thermal Management, Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, p.17, February 02-06, 2002
• 8: HotSpot at: http://lava.cs.virginia.edu/HotSopt/
• 9: L. Tran , N. Nelson , Fung Ngai , S. Dropsho , M. Huang, Dynamically reducing pressure on the physical register file through simple register sharing, Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, p.78-87, March 10-12, 2004
• 10: Wonbok Lee , Kimish Patel , Massoud Pedram, Dynamic thermal management for MPEG-2 decoding, Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Low power electronics and design, October 04-06, 2006, Tegernsee, Bavaria, Germany [doi>10.1145/1165573.1165647]
• 11: Simplescalar at: http://www.simplescalar.com
• 12: David Brooks , Vivek Tiwari , Margaret Martonosi, Wattch: a framework for architectural-level power analysis and optimizations, Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, p.83-94, June 2000, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 13: SPEC2000INT benchmark at: http://www.spec.org/cpu
• 14: Mediabench at: http://euler.sluedu/~fritts/mediabench
• 15: MPEG-2 Programs at: http://www.mpeg2.de/video/
• 16: Pentium IV floor-plan at: http://www.chip-architect.com

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.2 Design Aids
          Subjects: Simulation

General Terms:
Design, Reliability

Keywords:
register file, temperature-aware design, thermal model