Skewed Multistaged Multibanked Register File for Area and Energy Efficiency

Abstract

The region that includes the register file is a hot spot in high-performance cores that limits the clock frequency. Although multibanking drastically reduces the area and energy consumption of the register files of superscalar processor cores, it suffers from low IPC due to bank conflicts. Our skewed multistaging drastically reduces not the bank conflict probability but the pipeline disturbance probability by the second stage. The evaluation results show that, compared with NORCS, which is the latest research on a register file for area and energy efficiency, a proposed register file with 18 banks achieves a 39.9% and 66.4% reduction in circuit area and in energy consumption, while maintaining a relative IPC of 97.5%.