Low Effort Design Space Exploration Methodology for Configurable Caches

Designers can reduce design space exploration time and efforts using the design space subsetting method that removes energy-redundant configurations. However, the subsetting method requires a priori knowledge of all applications. We analyze the impact of a priori application knowledge on the subset quality by varying the amount of a priori application information available to designers during design time from no information to a general knowledge of the application domain. The results showed that only a small set of applications representative of the anticipated applications’ general domains alleviated the design efforts and was sufficient to provide energy savings within 5.6% of the complete, unsubsetted design space. Furthermore, since using a small set of applications was likely to reduce the design space exploration time, we analyze and quantify the impact of a priori applications knowledge on the speedup in the execution time to select the desired configurations. The results revealed that a basic knowledge of the anticipated applications reduced the subset design space exploration time by up to 6.6X