Combining power and arithmetic optimization via datapath rewriting
OA Location
Author(s)
Coward, Samuel
Drane, Theo
Morini, Emiliano
Constantinides, George
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Industrial datapath designers consider dynamic power consumption to be a key metric. Arithmetic circuits contribute a major component of total chip power consumption and are therefore a common target for power optimization. While arithmetic circuit area and dynamic power consumption are often correlated, there is also a tradeoff to consider, as additional gates can be added to explicitly reduce arithmetic circuit activity and hence reduce power consumption. In this work, we consider two forms of power optimization and their interaction: circuit area reduction via arithmetic optimization, and the elimination of redundant computations using both data and clock gating. By encoding both these classes of optimization as local rewrites of expressions, our tool flow can simultaneously explore them, uncovering new opportunities for power saving through arithmetic rewrites using the e-graph data structure. Since power consumption is highly dependent upon the workload performed by the circuit, our tool flow facilitates a data dependent design paradigm, where an implementation is automatically tailored to particular contexts of data activity. We develop an automated RTL to RTL optimization framework, ROVER, that takes circuit input stimuli and generates power-efficient architectures. We evaluate the effectiveness on both open-source arithmetic benchmarks and benchmarks derived from Intel production examples. The tool is able to reduce the total power consumption by up to 33.9%.
Date Issued
2024
Date Acceptance
2024-04-11
Citation
2024 IEEE 31st Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH), 2024, pp.24-31
ISBN
979-8-3503-8432-1
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Start Page
24
End Page
31
Journal / Book Title
2024 IEEE 31st Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH)
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2024 IEEE. This is the author’s accepted manuscript made available under a CC-BY licence in accordance with Imperial’s Research Publications Open Access policy (www.imperial.ac.uk/oa-policy)
License URL
Identifier
https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/arith/2024/843200a024/1YiWfi6jwOs
Source
IEEE International Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH 2024)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2024-06-10
Finish Date
2024-06-12
Coverage Spatial
Malaga, Spain
Date Publish Online
2024-06-10