A First-Order Approximation Of Microarchitecture Energy-Efficiency

With the increasing demand for performance and the slowness in process technology, it is becoming critical to understand micro architecture efficiency. This paper presents a simple model for approximating the contribution of the microarchitecture vs. the contribution of the process technology to the overall energy-efficiency of a processor. The results indicate that the contribution of microarchitectural changes is highly workload-dependent and is negligible for several workloads. Our method can be applied to other workloads and systems because its underlying analytical model is manufacturing- and workload-independent.