ACM Home Page
Please provide us with feedback. Feedback
Wattch: a framework for architectural-level power analysis and optimizations
Full text PdfPdf (274 KB)
Source ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News archive
Volume 28 ,  Issue 2  (May 2000) table of contents
Special Issue: Proceedings of the 27th annual international symposium on Computer architecture (ISCA '00)
Pages: 83 - 94  
Year of Publication: 2000
ISSN:0163-5964
Also published in ...
Authors
David Brooks  Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Vivek Tiwari  Intel Corporation
Margaret Martonosi  Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
Bibliometrics
Downloads (6 Weeks): 46,   Downloads (12 Months): 363,   Citation Count: 461
Additional Information:

abstract   references   cited by   index terms   collaborative colleagues  

Tools and Actions: Review this Article  
DOI Bookmark: Use this link to bookmark this Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/342001.339657
What is a DOI?

ABSTRACT

Power dissipation and thermal issues are increasingly significant in modern processors. As a result, it is crucial that power/performance tradeoffs be made more visible to chip architects and even compiler writers, in addition to circuit designers. Most existing power analysis tools achieve high accuracy by calculating power estimates for designs only after layout or floorplanning are complete. In addition to being available only late in the design process, such tools are often quite slow, which compounds the difficulty of running them for a large space of design possibilities. This paper presents Wattch, a framework for analyzing and optimizing microprocessor power dissipation at the architecture-level. Wattch is 1000X or more faster than existing layout-level power tools, and yet maintains accuracy within 10% of their estimates as verified using industry tools on leading-edge designs. This paper presents several validations of Wattch's accuracy. In addition, we present three examples that demonstrate how architects or compiler writers might use Wattch to evaluate power consumption in their design process. We see Wattch as a complement to existing lower-level tools; it allows architects to explore and cull the design space early on, using faster, higher-level tools. It also opens up the field of power-efficient computing to a wider range of researchers by providing a power evaluation methodology within the portable and familiar SimpleScalar framework.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

1
2
 
3
 
4
M. Borah, R. Owens, and M. Irwin. Transistor sizing for low power CMOS circuits. IEEE Transactions on Computer- Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 15(6):665- 71, 1996.
 
5
 
6
7
 
8
R. Chen, M. Irwin, and R. Bajwa. An architectural level power estimator. In Power-Driven Microarchitecture Workshop at ISCA25, 1998.
9
 
10
H. Fair and D. Bailey. Clocking Design and Analysis for a 600MHz Alpha Microprocessor. In ISSCC Digest of Technical Papers, pages 398-399, February 1998.
11
 
12
R. Gonzalez and M. Horowitz. Energy Dissipation in General Purpose Microprocessors. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 31(9):1277-84, 1996.
13
 
14
L. Gwennap. Intel's P6 uses decoupled superscalar design. Microprocessor Report, pages 9-15, Feb. 16, 1995.
 
15
 
16
17
18
 
19
Mentor Graphics Corporation, 1999.
 
20
21
 
22
S. Palacharla, N. Jouppi, and J. Smith. Quantifying the Complexity of Superscalar Processors. In Univ. of Wisconsin Computer Science Tech. Report 1328, 1997.
 
23
 
24
25
26
 
27
 
28
Synopsys Corporation. Powermill Data Sheet, 1999.
29
 
30
S. Wilton and N. Jouppi. An Enhanced Access and Cycle Time Model for On-chip Caches. In WRL Research Report 93/5, DEC Western Research Laboratory, 1994.
 
31
R. Zimmermann and W. Fichtner. Low-power logic styles: CMOS versus pass-transistor logic. IEEE Journal of Solid- State Circuits, 32(7):1079-90, 1997.
32

CITED BY  464

Collaborative Colleagues:
David Brooks: colleagues
Vivek Tiwari: colleagues
Margaret Martonosi: colleagues