Combining data remapping and voltage/frequency scaling of second level memory for energy reduction in embedded systems

In this paper we show that the energy reductions obtained from using two techniques, data remapping (DR) and voltage/frequency scaling of off-chip bus and memory, combine to provide interesting trade offs between energy, execution time and power. Both methods aim to reduce the energy consumed by the memory subsystem. DR is a fully automatic compile time technique applicable to pointer-intensive dynamic applications. Voltage/frequency scaling of off-chip memory is a technique applied at the hardware level. When combined together, energy reductions can be as high as 49.45%. The improvements are verified in the context of three OLDEN pointer-centric benchmarks, namely Perimeter, Health and TSP. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.