Adopting the banked register file scheme for better performance and less leakage

Abstract

Excessively high temperature deteriorates the reliability and increases the leakage power consumption of microprocessors. The register file, known as one of the hottest functional units in microprocessors, incurs frequent dynamic thermal management operations for thermal control. In this letter we adopt the banked register file scheme, which was originally proposed to reduce dynamic power consumption. By simply modifying the register file structure, the temperature in the register file was reduced dramatically, resulting in 13.37% performance improvement and 10.49% total processor leakage reduction.