Reducing the Energy Dissipation of the Issue Queue by Exploiting Narrow Immediate Operands

Abstract

In contemporary superscalar microprocessors, issue queue is a considerable energy dissipating component due its complex scheduling logic. In addition to the energy dissipated for scheduling activities, read and write lines of the issue queue entries are also high energy consuming pieces of the issue queue. When these lines are used for reading and writing unnecessary information bits, such as the immediate operand part of an instruction that does not use the immediate field or the insignificant higher order bits of an immediate operand that are in fact not needed, significant amount of energy is wasted. In this paper, we propose two techniques to reduce the energy dissipation of the issue queue by exploiting the immediate operand files of the stored instructions: firstly by storing immediate operands in separate immediate operand files rather than storing them inside the issue queue entries and secondly by issue queue partitioning based on widths of immediate operands of instructions. We present our performance results and energy savings using a cycle accurate simulator and testing the design with SPEC2K benchmarks and 90 nm CMOS (UMC) technology.