Energy efficient co-adaptive instruction fetch and issue

Front-end instruction delivery accounts for a significant fraction of the energy consumed in a dynamic superscalar processor. The issue queue in these processors serves two crucial roles: it bridges the front and back ends of the processor and serves as the window of instructions for the outof-order engine. A mismatch between the front end producer rate and back end consumer rate, and between the supplied instruction window from the front end, and the required instruction window to exploit the level of application parallelism, results in additional front-end energy, and increases the issue queue utilization. While the former increases overall processor energy consumption, the latter aggravates the issue queue hot spot problem. We propose a complementary combination of fetch gatin