Wattch: a framework for architectural-level power analysis and optimizations

Power dissipation and thermal issues are increasingly significant in modern processors. As a result, it is crucial that power/performance tradeoffs be made more visible to chip architects and even compiler writers, in addition to circuit designers. Most existing power analysis tools achieve high accuracy by calculating power estimates for designs only after layout or floorplanning are complete. In addition to being available only late in the design process, such tools are often quite slow, which compounds the difficulty of running them for a large space of design possibilities. This paper presents Wattch, a framework for analyzing and optimizing microprocessor power dissipation at the architecture-level.…