Portable embedded devices must presently run multimedia and wireless network applications with enormous computational performance requirements at a low energy consumption. In these applications, the dynamic memory subsystem is one of the main sources of power consumption and its inappropriate management can severely affect the performance of the system. In this paper, we present a new system-level approach to cover the large space of dynamic memory management implementations without a time-consuming programming effort and to obtain power consumption estimates that can be used to refine the dynamic memory management subsystem in an early stage of the design flow.