SUMMARYRecently, we have proposed using a Linear Array Pipeline Processor (LAPP) to improve energy efficiency for various workloads such as image processing and to maintain programmability by working on VLIW codes. In this paper, we proposed an instruction mapping scheme for LAPP to fully exploit the array execution of functional units (FUs) and bypass networks by a mapper to fit the VLIW codes onto the FUs. The mapping can be finished within multi-cycles during a data prefetch before the array execution of FUs. According to an HDL based implementation, the hardware required for mapping scheme is 84% of the cost introduced by a baseline method. In addition, the proposed mapper can further help to shrink the size of array stage, as our results show that their combination becomes 88% of the baseline model in area.
Implementing last level caches (LLCs) with STT-MRAM is a promising approach for designing energy efficient microprocessors due to high density and low leakage power of its memory cells. However, peripheral circuits of an STT-MRAM cache still suffer from leakage power because large and leaky transistors are required to drive large write current to STT-MRAM element. To overcome this problem, we propose a new power management scheme called Immediate Sleep (IS). IS immediately turns off a subarray of an STT-MRAM cache if the next access is predicted to be not critical in performance. Thus, IS can effectively reduce leakage energy with little impact on performance. Our experimental results show that our technique can save the leakage energy of an STT-MRAM LLC by 32% compared to an STT-MRAM LLC with the conventional scheme at the same performance.
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