Minimizing energy consumption for high-performance processing

Power consumption is becoming an increasingly important constraint in the design of microprocessors. This paper ex-amines the use of multiple constrained processors running at lowered voltage and frequency to perform a similar amount of work in less time and lower power than a uniprocessor. The paper also studies the effect of reducing cache and Branch Target Buffer (BTB) sizes for further reducing power con-sumption while still providing adequate performance. The best configuration requiring four processors reduced energy by 56%. Reducing cache and BTB provided a further 16% savings in energy while still finishing the workload in the same amount of time as the uniprocessor.