Power-efficient computing for compute-intensive GPGPU applications

Abstract

The peak compute performance of GPUs has been increased by integrating more compute resources and operating them at higher frequency. However, such approaches significantly increase power consumption of GPUs, limiting further performance increase due to the power constraint. Facing such a challenge, we propose three techniques to improve power efficiency and performance of GPUs in this paper. First, we observe that many GPGPU applications are integer-intensive. For such applications, we combine a pair of dependent integer instructions into a composite instruction that can be executed by an enhanced fused multiply-add unit. Second, we observe that computations for many instructions are duplicated across multiple threads. We dynamically detect such instructions and execute them in a separate scalar unit. Finally, we observe that 16 or fewer bits are sufficient for accurate representation of operands and results of many instructions. Thus, we split the 32-bit datapath into two 16-bit datapath slices that can concurrently issue and execute up to two such instructions per cycle. All three proposed techniques can considerably increase utilization of compute resources, improving power efficiency and performance by 20% and 15%, respectively.