An analytical model based on performance demand of workload for energy-efficient heterogeneous multicore systems

Abstract

Compute platforms are increasingly adopting heterogeneous multicore processing. This paper derives an analytical model to study the benefits and preferred configurations of the single instruction set architecture (ISA) heterogeneous multicore system. We analyze the performance, energy consumption, and energy efficiency of the heterogeneous multicore system under realistic workload based on proposed analytical model. We start by deriving a model for a simple machine that has a single big core (that is high performance) and a single small core (that is energy efficient). Then, we extend our model to deal with machines that have multiple big and small cores. The results obtained using our models show that we can achieve higher performance and lower energy consumption with a heterogeneous multicore system than with a similarly provisioned homogeneous multicore system. Additionally we derive models that assume different practical constraints from ideal heterogeneous multicore model to offer further insights into how to configure given processing cores for optimal efficiency in performance and energy consumption.