On the energy-efficiency of software transactional memory

Abstract

Traditional software transactional memory designs are targeted towards performance and therefore little is known about their impact on energy consumption. We provide, in this paper, a comprehensive energy analysis of a standard STM design and propose novel scratchpad-based energy-aware STM design strategies. Experimental results collected through a state-of-the-art MPSoC simulation infrastructure show that our approach can achieve an energy improvement of up to ~36% with regard to the base STM for applications characterized by short-lived transactions and relatively high abort rate.