An XOR-Based Approach to Merging Entries for Instruction Register Files

The instruction register file (IRF) is an attractive approach to reduce power consumption, which is essential to many embedded systems. However, the previously proposed IRF implementation is not efficient in merging similar instructions into a single entry in the IRF. In this paper, we propose an XOR-based merging approach that achieves higher efficiency in grouping instructions with simple hardware. Our evaluation shows that the proposed approach can convert 19.6% more dynamic instructions into references of the IRF than the previous techniques, and that it reduces the number of instruction fetches from the cache by 4.8% on average.