Instruction scheduling based on energy and performance constraints

Abstract

Reducing energy consumption has become an important issue in designing hardware and software systems in recent years. Although low power hardware components are critical for reducing energy consumption, the software running on these systems largely determines the switching activity, which is the main source of dynamic power dissipation in electronic systems.In this paper, we present and evaluate several instruction scheduling algorithms that reorder a given sequence of instructions taking into account the energy considerations. We first compare a performance-oriented scheduling technique with three energy-oriented instruction-scheduling algorithms from both performance (execution cycles of the resulting schedules) and energy consumption points of view. Then, we propose three scheduling algorithms that consider energy and performance at the same time. The results obtained show that these techniques are quite successful in reducing energy consumption and their performance is comparable to that of a pure performance-oriented scheduling.