Employing Hardware Transactional Memory in Prefetching for Energy Efficiency

Energy efficiency is becoming a highly significant topic regarding modern hardware. The need for decreased energy consumption in our computers and more battery life in our laptops and smart-phones is increasing, without sustaining performance loss in our machines. Much work is being conducted towards that cause and as a result our lives could become more convenient. For serving the purpose of this project, we have investigated the implementation of Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) in the prefetching phase of Decoupled Access/Execute (DAE) model [1]. The challenge posed by using DAE model is to make sure the memory state remains intact while prefetching data. We propose a solution to overcome this challenge by employing HTM that is supported by Intel's latest processors. An innovative approach of HTM was carried out, in order to achieve the final implementation of it in the Access phase of the DAE model. Evaluation proved that benefits resulting from the DAE model utilization can be maintained by our approach. Furthermore, we are able to extend the use of the model to more applications that was previously not possible