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As processors get smaller and faster, it becomes more important to limit the amount of electrical energy that gets turned into heat. Already there are sophisticated cooling systems built into and on top of a processor's packaging, but these are expensive and bulky and so manufacturers are also looking at ways of reducing the amount of power consumed, rather than ways of controlling it. One of the most power-hungry structures in the processor is the issue queue, which has been estimated to consume 25% of the total power. This talk presents a compiler technique to control the number of instructions entering the issue queue, which can dramatically reduce its power requirements whilst having a negligible effect on performance.
