Compiler-directed data cache leakage reduction

Leakage energy reduction for caches has been the target of many recent research efforts. In this work, we propose a novel compiler directed approach to reduce the data cache leakage energy by exploiting the program behavior The proposed approach is based on the observation that only a small portion of data are active at runtime and the program spends a lot of execution time in loops, so a large portion of data cache lines, which are not accessed by the loops, can be placed into leakage control mode to reduce leakage energy consumption. The experimental results show that the proposal approach is comparable to the pure hardware based approach in reducing data cache leakage energy.