查看文章

The Register File (RF) is a critical structure in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) responsible for a large portion of the area and power. To simplify the architecture of the RF, it is organized in a multi-bank configuration with a single port for each bank. Not surprisingly, the frequent accesses to the register file during kernel execution incur a sizeable overhead in GPU power consumption, and introduce delays as accesses are serialized when port conflicts occur. In this paper, we observe that there is a high degree of temporal locality in accesses to the registers: within short instruction windows, the same registers are often accessed repeatedly. We characterize the opportunities to reduce register accesses as a function of the size of the instruction window considered, and establish that there are many recurring reads and updates of the same register operands in most GPU computations. To exploit this opportunity, we …