A method and system to reduce the power consumption of a memory device. In one embodiment of the invention, the memory device is a N-way set-associative level one (L1) cache memory and there is logic coupled with the data cache memory to facilitate access to only part of the N-ways of the N-way set-associative L1 cache memory in response to a load instruction or a store instruction. By reducing the number of ways to access the N-way set-associative L1 cache memory for each load or store request, the power requirements of the N-way set-associative L1 cache memory is reduced in one embodiment of the invention. In one embodiment of the invention, when a prediction is made that the accesses to cache memory only requires the data arrays of the N-way set-associative L1 cache memory, the access to the fill buffers are deactivated or disabled.