Characterizing and Exploiting Small-Value Memory Instructions
Journal article, 2014

This paper exploits small-value locality to accelerate the execution of memory instructions. We find that small-value loads-loads with small-value operands of 8 bits or less-are common across 52 applications from the desktop, embedded, and media domains. We show that the relative occurrences of small-value loads remain fairly stable during the program execution. Moreover, we establish that the frequency of small-value loads are almost independent of compiler and input data. We then introduce the concept of small-value caches (SVC) to compactly store small-value memory words. We show that SVCs provide significant speedup and reduce the overall energy dissipation with negligible chip-area overhead.

Author

Mafijul Islam

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Per Stenström

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computer Engineering (Chalmers)

Published in

IEEE Transactions on Computers

0018-9340 (ISSN)

Vol. 63 Issue 7 p. 1640-1655 art. no 6470582

Categorizing

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories (SSIF 2011)

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

Identifiers

DOI

10.1109/TC.2013.39

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 6