Processor energy estimation method using cycle-approximate simulator

In existing methods for processor energy estimation, the information on the internal state of processor architecture, i.e., (de)activation of specific modules such as pipeline stages and the cache, is available via a cycle-accurate simulator. Despite good accuracy, above methods are too slow due to the complexity of cycle-accurate simulation. This paper describes a new technique for estimating the energy consumption of processors by predicting the internal information of processor architecture through a cycle-approximate simulator. We have evaluated our approach in comparison with an existing energy estimation method using a cycle-accurate ARM v5 architecture simulator. Experimental results shows that the proposed method achieves 97% accuracy and 28 times speed-up on average.