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Home > Functional Description > Power management > Energy efficiency features |
The features of the Cortex-A9 processor that improve energy efficiency include:
accurate branch and return prediction, reducing the number of incorrect instruction fetch and decode operations
the use of physically addressed caches, reducing the number of cache flushes and refills, saving energy in the system
the use of micro TLBs reduces the power consumed in translation and protection look-ups for each cycle
caches that use sequential access information to reduce the number of accesses to the tag RAMs and to unnecessary accesses to data RAMs
small loop mode.Instruction loops that are smaller than 64 bytes often complete without additional instruction cache accesses, so lowering power consumption.
In the Cortex-A9 processor, extensive use is also made of gated clocks and gates to disable inputs to unused functional blocks. Only the logic in use to perform an operation consumes any dynamic power.