A banked-promotion TLB for high performance and low power

Abstract

This research is to design a simple but high performance TLB (translation lookaside buffer) system with low power consumption. Thus, we propose a new TLB structure supporting two page sizes dynamically and selectively for high performance and low cost design without any operating system support. For high performance, a promotion-TLB is designed by supporting two page sizes. Also in order to attain low power consumption, a banked-TLB is constructed by dividing one fully associative TLB space into two sub fully associative TLBs. These two structures are integrated to form a banked-promotion TLB as a low power and high performance TLB structure for embedded processors. According to the results of comparison and analysis, a similar performance can be achieved by using fewer TLB entries and also energy dissipation can be reduced by around 50% compared with the fully associative TLB.