Intel powers up plans for low-power chips

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actually...

First of all thanks everyone for all the polite and nice feedback... I was expecting all kinds of flame saying how I forgot some type of something somewhere.

It is interesting though that you talk about that, because I know of someone who is working on something like that for their doctoral research in CompSci. Dr. Daniel Jimenez at Rutgers University is big into branch prediction and ways to accurately measure it... and he's working on a project now with some students to characterize different branch prediction methods based on the amount of power they cause the system to consume when working on different benchmarks.

As you may or may not know branch prediction allows CPUs to guess very accurately if a jump (basically a if-then statement in machine instructions) will be taken or not. If you can predict it accurately, you can save a lot of time. Today's branch predictors are actually amazingly accurate. Most can guess correctly more than 92% of the time!

It is interesting though that usually just percentages are used, but no one usually measures the effect on the system to see if a branch predictor is making it run any better. It could be that a branch predictor has a lower accuracy, but the things it misses don't cause much work, but another one with better accuracy misses on really bad instructions that cause lots of extra work... so even though it appears to be more accurate, it doesn't help the system to run better... hence the work to measure branch predictors based on the amount of power they cause the system to use.

Posted by: deymious@...   Posted on: 09/18/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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