ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DYNAMICALLY ALLOCATING RESOURCES ACROSS PROGRAM EXECUTION PHASES FOR MEDIA WORKLOADS

Processing embedded applications is essentially a tradeoff between power and performance. Increasing level of com-plexity in present day microprocessor at the expense of more power cell for different optimization methodologies at archi-tecture level. The study of general characteristics of pro-gram execution phases gives insight to dynamically reconfig-ure or enable/disable additional resources on-demand basis. This leads to significant amount of power saving with neg-ligible or tolerable performance degradation. In this paper we characterize execution of such programs into execution phases based on their dynamic IPC profile. We show that program execution of selected phases (based on IPC pro-file) can be dynamically boosted by activating additional standby functional units which are otherwise powered down for saving energy. Through simulation we show that speedup ranging from 1.1 to 1.25 can be achieved while reducing the energy-delay product (EDP) for most of the media bench-marks evaluated. 1