Application-oriented cache memory configuration for energy efficiency in multi-cores

This study describes and evaluates an automated technique that exploits the potential of heterogeneous multi-core processor (HMP) systems when customised with respect to the number of cores and L1 cache memory sizes using a field programmable gate array fitted with LEON3 cores at its base. The authors evaluated the real energy consumption of the HMP system tuned for a set of 50 application codes using a data-mining tool for finding code similarities and selecting HMP configurations. The selected HMP system configuration requires a small cache configuration and consumes less energy when compared to a homogeneous system with the same number of cores and only with a very modest increase in execution time.