Prefetching-aware cache line turnoff for saving leakage energy

While numerous prior studies focused on performance and energy optimizations for caches, their interactions have received much less attention. This paper studies this interaction and demonstrates how performance and energy optimizations can affect each other. More importantly, we propose three optimization schemes that turn off cache lines in a prefetching-sensitive manner. These schemes treat prefetched cache lines differently from the lines brought to the cache in a normal way (i.e., through a load operation) in turning off the cache lines. Our experiments with applications from the SPEC2000 suite indicate that the proposed approaches save significant leakage energy with very small degradation on performance.