Low power data processing by elimination of redundant computations

Abstract

We suggest a new technique to reduce energy consumption in the processor datapath without sacrificing performance by exploiting operand value locality at run time. Data locality is one of the major characteristics of video streams as well as other commonly used applications. We use a cache-like scheme to store a selective history of computation results, and the resultant re-use leads to power savings. The cache is indexed by the operands. Based on our model, an 8 to 128 entry execution cache reduces power consumption by 20% to 60%.