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Power Considerations

 

 

 

Power consumption is becoming more interesting. Current processors consume huge amounts of energy. Huge power consumption increases the chip temperature which requires more expensive package, and reduces the chip reliability. Energy efficiency is even more important in systems that work with batteries.

To analyze the energy consumption we have extended our instruction driven simulator to calculate the total energy consumption. A more detailed information about the simulation environment can be found in the Publications section.

The FlexRAM architecture has been tuned to reduce the energy consumption. The Energy-Delay product is a very common metric for this purpose. Since we also target the high performance market we have choose a more aggressive solution. We activate dynamically a bunch of well known energy-delay techniques. The proposed framework trades energy for performance only when is needed.

Although the work has been done in the FlexRAM architecture, the same or similar solutions can be applied to more general purpose processors. 

 

 

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Last modified: September 10, 2000