Increased power consumption when disabling the prefetch of the C8051F36x family
01/14/2016 | 12:44 AM
Question
How is the current consumption affected in the C8051F36x family when the prefetch engine is disabled?
Answer
There are a couple consequences of disabling the prefetch engine in CCH0CN:
Disabling the prefetch engine would likely cause a dramatic number of cache misses and cause the core to stall as instructions are fetched from flash. This would be especially problematic in a loop, which would involve at least a couple branches (more specifically, jumps) per loop iteration on top of the other calculations performed on every iteration.
As a result, the core will likely draw extra power with this setting as a result of significantly more flash accesses and core stalls as instructions are being fetched from memory.
Increased power consumption when disabling the prefetch of the C8051F36x family