A Method to Reduce Energy Consumption of Conditional Operations with Execution Probabilities

Abstract

In conditional processing, operations are executed conditionally based on the result of condition operations. While the speculative execution of conditional operations achieves higher processing speed, unnecessary energy may be consumed by the speculatively executed operations. In this paper, reduction of the energy consumption of conditional processing is considered for time and resource constrained processing. An efficient method to calculate the probability of operation execution is presented. Based on the probabilities of execution, a scheduling exploration with the simulated annealing and a heuristic scheduling algorithm are proposed to minimize the energy consumption of the conditional processing by reducing unnecessary speculative operations. The experimental results show 5% to 10% energy can be reduced by the proposed methods for the same configuration of resources.