Is there any practical method to only measure the power consumption of combined cache memory. I am intereted in measuring the power conumption overhead when replacing blocks, and or filling the cache after start-up. Also of interest is extending this to the power consumption of the whole cache/bus/memory system.
If there is no practicl way, are there any simulator or power calculators which does so. Thanks
Best Answer
There are device-level modeling tools, e.g. CACTI, NVSim, DESTINY, etc., which have been validated against real-world prototypes. These tools have been used in models such as McPAT, which have been integrated in several simulators such as Gem5, Sniper etc. For reference on these, see my paper and tool-review.
Note that measuring the energy consumption of block replacement or fill precisely is very difficult. For this, circuit-level modeling is required. The code of these tools is publicly available, so you can do desired modeling.