Low Power Design for a Multi-core Multi-thread Microprocessor

Power efficiency of microprocessor is essential to green computing. As most microprocessors become multi-core and multi-thread, it´s important to study low power design for them. The architecture of MCMT, a multi-core multi-thread microprocessor, is described briefly in this paper. Several low power design techniques, including fine-grained clock gating, instruction throttling and adaptive L2 cache are presented to reduce both the dynamic power and the leakage power. Experimental results show that the presented techniques can meet the power constraints.