Towards Increased Power Efficiency in Low End Embedded Processors: Can Cache Help?

Embedded processors are often characterized by limited resources and are optimized for specific applications. A rising number of battery powered applications has driven a trend towards increased energy efficiency sometimes even traded with performance. Particularly, lower power and low specification embedded processors lack on-chip cache memories. This is mainly in order to avoid the higher energy overhead a cache structure would pose in an embedded processor. This paper proposes energy and throughput models which can be used to analyze energy and time overhead for a particular application due to introduction of a data cache architecture in a previously non-cached system or alternatively can be used in reconfigurable systems for cache overhead analysis. 1