CG-OoO: Energy-Efficient Coarse-Grain Out-of-Order Execution

TL;DR

CG-OoO is a novel processor architecture that combines energy efficiency with OoO performance by using block-level processing, compiler optimizations, and a simplified out-of-order scheduling model, significantly reducing energy consumption.

Contribution

It introduces a block-level out-of-order processor architecture with compiler and hardware techniques to achieve near In-Order energy efficiency while maintaining OoO performance.

Findings

Closes 64% of the energy gap between In-Order and OoO processors.

Achieves 1.9x better energy-delay product than traditional OoO processors.

Utilizes block-level processing and Skipahead issue for efficiency.

Abstract

We introduce the Coarse-Grain Out-of-Order (CG- OoO) general purpose processor designed to achieve close to In-Order processor energy while maintaining Out-of-Order (OoO) performance. CG-OoO is an energy-performance proportional general purpose architecture that scales according to the program load. Block-level code processing is at the heart of the this architecture; CG-OoO speculates, fetches, schedules, and commits code at block-level granularity. It eliminates unnecessary accesses to energy consuming tables, and turns large tables into smaller and distributed tables that are cheaper to access. CG-OoO leverages compiler-level code optimizations to deliver efficient static code, and exploits dynamic instruction-level parallelism and block-level parallelism. CG-OoO introduces Skipahead issue, a complexity effective, limited out-of-order instruction scheduling model. Through the energy efficiency techniques applied to the compiler and processor pipeline stages, CG-OoO closes 64% of the average energy gap between the In-Order and Out-of-Order baseline processors at the performance of the OoO baseline. This makes CG-OoO 1.9x more efficient than the OoO on the energy-delay product inverse metric.