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)

IEEE Transactions on Computers

0018-9340 (ISSN)

Vol. 63 7 1640-1655 6470582

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/TC.2013.39

More information

Latest update

4/5/2022 6