Adaptive techniques for leakage power management in L2 cache peripheral circuits

Recent studies indicate that a considerable amount of an L2 cache leakage power is dissipated in its peripheral circuits, e.g., decoders, word-lines and I/O drivers. In addition, L2 cache is becoming larger, thus increasing the leakage power. This paper proposes two adaptive architectural techniques (ADM and ASM) to reduce leakage in the L2 cache peripheral circuits. The adaptive techniques use the product of cache hierarchy miss rates to guide the leakage control in accordance with program behavior. The result for SPEC2K benchmarks show that the first technique (ASM) achieves a 34% average leakage power reduction with a 1.8% average IPC reduction. The second technique (ADM) achieves a 52% average savings with a 1.9% average IPC reduction. This corresponds to a 2 to 3 X improvement over recently proposed static techniques.