Architectural approaches to reducing power related system costs

Abstract

The power dissipation of modern processors is steadily increasing, keeping pace with growing transistor counts and increasing clock frequencies. In an effort to counteract this trend, integrated circuit designers are aggressively employing design optimizations to minimize circuit power consumption. Power reduction was a key focus of the Intel Pentium 4 processor design team, and the design team focused from the beginning on reducing power consumption without compromising other design targets. Many techniques, both innovative and pre-existing, were applied across all functional units in the processor in an effort to eliminate unnecessary power consumption. The mass adoption of these techniques resulted in a significant reduction in both maximum and typical processor power dissipation.