Development of an implementation-centric energy-evaluation framework for MIPS-I pipelines

Abstract

An RTL-based energy evaluation framework dubbed CREEP (Chalmers Energy Evaluation framework for Pipelines) is implemented and evaluated. The framework consists of pipeline RTL and the architectural simulator SimpleScalar. Power estimates are extracted from the RTL and combined with performance counters generated by SimpleScalar. The combination lends SimpleScalar accurate energy estimates otherwise reserved to low level circuit analysis. The framework has been used to characterize several different embedded processor configurations. Additionally, a case study of the framework was used to implement and evaluate a speculative way-halting technique called SHA which pointed to a 25.6% energy reduction in a conventional four-way data cache.