Event-Based Power/Performance-Aware Thermal Management for High-Density Microprocessors

Abstract

The density of modern microprocessors is so high, that operating all their units at full power would destroy them by thermal runaway. Hence, thermal control is vital, but at the same time has to integrate with power/performance management, to not unduly limit computational speed. In addition, the controller must be simple and computationally light, as millisecond-scale response is required. Finally, since microprocessors face a variety of operating conditions, postsilicon tuning is an issue. We here present a solution, by exploiting event-based control and a hardware/software partition to maximize efficiency, lightness, and flexibility. We show experiments on real hardware, evidencing the obtained advantages over the state of the art.