Scribd
Upload
10 views2 pages

Program Level Energy and Power Analysis and Optimization: Circuit State

Uploaded by

balajipandiyan2604
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
10 views2 pages

Program Level Energy and Power Analysis and Optimization: Circuit State

Uploaded by

balajipandiyan2604
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

ROHINI College of Engineering and Technology

Program Level Energy and Power Analysis and Optimization


Power consumption is a particularly important design metric for battery-
powered systems because the battery has a very limited lifetime.
Power consumed by the CPU is a major part of the total power
consumption of a computer system and thus has been the main target of power
consumption analysis.
How long the device needs to run and whether the batteries can be
recharged, need to be thought out ahead of time. In some systems, replacing a
battery in a device can be a big expense. This means the system must be conscious
of the amount of power it uses and take appropriate steps to conserve battery life.
There are several methods to conserve power in an embedded system, including
clock control, power-sensitive processors, low-voltage ICs and circuit shutdown.
By measuring the current drawn by the processor as it repeatedly executes
distinct instructions or distinct instruction sequences, it is possible to obtain most
of the information that is required to evaluate the power consumption of a
program for the processor under test.
Power is modeled as a base cost for each instruction plus the inter-
instruction overheads that depend on neighboring instructions. The base cost of
an instruction can be considered as the cost associated with the basic processing
needed to execute the instruction.
However, when sequences of instructions are considered, certain inter-
instruction effects come into play, which are not reflected in the cost computed
solely from base cost.
1. Circuit state : Switching activity depends on the current inputs and
previous circuit state.
2. Resource constraints : Resource constraints in the CPU can lead to stalls
e.g. pipeline stalls and write buffer stalls.
3. Cache misses : Another inter-instruction effect is the effect of cache
misses.

EC8791-Embedded and Realtime Systems


ROHINI College of Engineering and Technology

As the instruction cache size increases, the energy cost of the software on
the CPU declines, but the instruction cache comes to dominate the energy
consumption.
If the cache is too small, the program runs slowly and the system consumes
a lot of power due to the high cost of main memory accesses.
If the cache is too large, the power consumption is high without a
corresponding payoff in performance. At intermediate values, the execution time
and power consumption are both good.
Method for improving energy consumption :
1. Try to use registers efficiently
2. Analyze cache behavior to find major cache conflicts
3. Make use of page mode accesses in the memory system whenever possible
Some additional observations about energy optimization as follows :
1. Moderate loop unrolling eliminates some loop control overhead
2. Software pipelining reduces pipeline stalls, thereby reducing the average
energy per instruction.
3. Eliminating recursive procedure calls where possible saves power by
getting rid of function call overhead.

EC8791-Embedded and Realtime Systems

You might also like