IEICE Electronics Express
Online ISSN : 1349-2543
ISSN-L : 1349-2543
LETTER
An energy-efficient data cache with byte-repeat pattern encoding
Seungmin JungHyotaek ShimSeungryoul Maeng
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2008 Volume 5 Issue 19 Pages 833-839

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Abstract

The on-chip cache is a significant source of the energy consumption of today's processors. Several data compression techniques including Frequent Value Caches are proposed to reduce the energy consumption in the data cache memories. However, the preceding approach has some problems, such as the monitoring time to find the frequent values dedicated for each program and the additional registers to store the frequent values. By studying the behavior of MiBench and MediaBench programs, we observed that many data values stored in the data cache have a few word patterns in which one byte is repeated and/or the rest of bytes are all zeros. These values can be represented with one byte and the pattern type bits. We propose a new energy-efficient data cache, the Byte-Repeat Pattern Cache, which employs this encoding scheme.

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© 2008 by The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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