PARE: a power-aware hardware data prefetching engine

Abstract

Aggressive hardware prefetching often significantly increases energy consumption in the memory system. Experiments show that a major fraction of prefetching energy degradation is due to the hardware history table related energy costs. In this paper, the authors presented PARE, a power-aware prefetching engine that uses a newly designed indexed hardware history table. Compared to the conventional single table design, the new prefetching table consumes 7-11X less power per access. With the help of compiler-based location-set analysis, it is shown that the proposed PARE design improves energy consumption by as much as 40% in the data memory systems in 70nm processor designs.