Microarchitectural power modeling techniques for deep sub-micron microprocessors

Abstract

The need to perform early design studies that combine architectural simulation with power estimation has become critical as power has become a design constraint whose importance has moved to the fore. To satisfy this demand several microarchitectural power simulators have been developed around SimpleScalar, a widely used microarchitectural performance simulator. They have proven to be very useful at providing insights into power/performance trade-offs. However, they are neither parameterized nor technology scalable. In this paper, we propose more accurate parameterized power modeling techniques reflecting the actual technology parameters as well as input switching-events for memory and execution units. Compared to HSPICE, the proposed techniques show 93% and 91% accuracies for those blocks, but with a much faster simulation time. We also propose a more realistic power modeling technique for external I/O. In general, our approach includes more detailed microarchitectural and circuit modeling than has been the case in earlier simulators, without incurring a significant simulation time overhead--it can be as small as a few percent.