Dynamic Allocation of Datapath

About

The present invention is a system and method for reducing the power dissipation and energy requirements of high-performance microprocessors through the incremental allocation and deallocation of units of datapath resources like reorder buffers, physical registers, instruction queues and load-store queues. The allocation and deallocation decisions for these resources are made independently at run-time based on sampled estimates of the instantaneous resource needs of the program running on the microprocessor. Power and energy savings are achieved by shutting off resource units that are not needed for sustaining the performance requirements. Leakage energy and power as well as switching energy and power are reduced using the invention described.