Exploiting Zero Data to Reduce Register File and Execution Unit Dynamic Power Consumption in GPGPUs

To achieve high compute performance, graphics processing units (GPUs) provide a large register file and a large number of execution units. However, these design components consume a large portion of the total dynamic power in the GPU, particularly for general purpose applications. In this paper, we present a low-cost gating scheme to reduce dynamic power consumption in the register file and execution units without impacting performance. The scheme proposed dynamically exploit frequent found data value of zeros within and across registers in order to gate off register file reads and writes as well as execution units. We find that on general purpose applications from Rodinia, our low-cost gating scheme can reduce register file reads and writes on average by 35% and 40%, respectively. The register file and execution unit dynamic power are reduced on average by 19% and 13%, respectively. The reduction in total GPU dynamic power achieved is ranging from 3% to 19% with 8% on average with no performance loss.