With the push towards low-power applications, power consumption has become an important consideration in the design of embedded processors. Low power is critical for embedded applications since battery life is directly related to power consumed. Low power consumption also implies less heat generation. Excessive heat generation and localized hotspots may often become a critical factor in several embedded applications given the limited heat dissipation mechanisms available. As a result, we focus our analysis on the energy and temperature characteristics of different cache configurations in the embedded processor domain; evaluating 2 novel I-Cache designs – Filter Cache and HotSpot Cache.

Filter Cache

Hotspot Cache

Nominal Cache

Compare Architectures

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