Energy-Efficient Hardware Data Prefetching

A survey of architectural techniques for improving cache power efficiency

“…Guo et al [58] present techniques to reduce the energy overhead of prefetching techniques. One of their techniques uses compiler information to identify memory addresses which are useful for prefetching and then, prefetches only those memory addresses.…”

“…Further, cache energy saving can also be achieved using circuit-level techniques (e.g., lowleakage devices), however, in this paper we mainly focus on architecture-level techniques which allow runtime cache power management. Lastly, since different techniques have been evaluated using different simulation infrastructure and workloads, we do not include their quantitative improvement [9], [15], [16], [18], [18], [45]- [48] ESTs utilizing hardware support [12], [13], [48]- [53] ESTs utilizing software support [17], [23]- [26], [38], [54]- [56] ESTs utilizing compiler support [40], [41], [45], [57], [58] results. Rather, we focus on their key design principles, which can provide valuable insights.…”

A Survey of Recent Prefetching Techniques for Processor Caches

“…Several other prefetchers and variants of the above-mentioned prefetchers have been proposed, which are discussed in this survey. [Guo et al 2011;Kolli et al 2013;Dang et al 2012Dang et al , 2013Yu and Liu 2014;Lin 2006, 2009;Guttman et al 2015] Fairness [Ebrahimi et al 2011;Chaudhuri et al 2012;Albericio et al 2012] Level in cache hierarchy In first-level caches [Marathe and Mueller 2008;Guo et al 2011;Srinivasan et al 2001;Ferdman et al 2011;Kolli et al 2013;Reinman et al 1999;Ferdman et al 2008;Ferdman and Falsafi 2007;Lim and Byrd 2008;Somogyi et al 2006;Burcea et al 2008;Yu and Liu 2014;Hur and Lin 2006;Annavaram et al 2001b;Lai et al 2001;Falcón et al 2005;Yan and Zhang 2008;Hu et al 2003;Wenisch et al 2005;Peir et al 2002;Chilimbi and Hirzel 2002;Alameldeen and Wood 2007;Guttman et al 2015;Sherwood et al 2000;Iacobovici et al 2004;Joseph and Grunwald 1997;Kumar and Wilkerson 1998;Chen et al 2004;Mehta et al 2014] In mid/last level caches [Solihin et al 2003;…”

DRAM energy reduction by prefetching-based memory traffic clustering

“…Numerous prefetching techniques are proposed for performance enhancement. Techniques for reducing energy overhead due to prefetching have been studied in [8,16] prefetching on DRAM energy efficiency has not been investigated. Our proposed technique aims for reducing DRAM energy consumption using a prefetching mechanism, which differentiates our scheme.…”

“…Dependence-based prefetching is effective for applications which are pointer-intensive or contain a large number of dynamic data structures. Hardware cost of dependence-based prefetching is around twice compared to stride-based prefetching [8].…”