L1 Data Cache Power Reduction using a Forwarding Predictor

In most modern processor designs the L1 data cache has become a major consumer of power due to its increasing size and high frequency access rate. In order to reduce this power consumption, we propose in this paper a straightforward filtering technique. The mechanism is based on a highly accurate forwarding predictor that determines if a load instruction will take its corresponding data via forwarding from the load-store structure -thus avoiding the data cache access- or it should catch it from the data cache. Our simulation results show that 36% data cache power savings can be achieved on average, with a negligible performance penalty of 0.1%