Profile-driven program synthesis for evaluation of system power dissipation

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach for estimatingpower dissipation in a high performance microprocessor chip.First, characteristic profile (including parameters such as thecache miss rate, branch prediction miss rate, pipeline stalls,instruction mix, memory references, etc.) is extracted fromapplication programs. Then, mixed integer linear programmingand heuristic rules are used to gradually transform a genericprogram template to into a fully functional program. Thesynthesized program exhibits the same performance and powerdissipation behavior (as characterized by the extracted profile),yet it has an instruction trace orders of magnitude smaller thanthe initial trace. The synthesized program is subsequentlysimulated on a register-transfer level description of the targetmicroprocessor to provide the power dissipation value. Resultsobtained for the Intel's Pentium processor executing standardbenchmark programs show a simulation time reduction by 3-5orders of magnitude.