Abstract
At the heart of most technological advancements is a network of processors executing code and consuming energy. Understanding those systems’ energy consumption profiles provides optimisation possibilities and thus contributes to strategies for reducing energy consumption in general. This paper assesses the power consumption characteristics of a highly competitive low cost, small form factor development board (the Raspberry Pi4 model B), powered with the minimal load associated with its bare-metal configuration and the related impact on baseline power consumption. We also consider the load associated with an out-of-box operating system, running at several underclocking frequency scaling levels and the associated impact on baseline power consumption. Our experimental set-up consists of integrating an INA219 high-side current sense amplifier for the capturing of power, current, and voltage measurements; and a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller for sampling. Overall, our results indicate statistically significant differences in overall power consumption distribution characteristics across all models. Our results also indicate the presence of three distinct power phase envelopes and statistically significant differences in mean and median power measurements between the different underclocking frequency test cases and the bare-metal cases. Our results also indicate that power consumption is an increasing monotonic function across test scenarios. Finally, our results have also shown that isolating power consumption composite distributions increases model predictability from 67% to 97%.
Highlights
In today’s global society, the challenges faced in climate change have been at the forefront of discussion for several decades and are even more prevalent, and have included a focus on societal energy consumption
The first two bare-metal cases are associated with the boot cycle failing to find a kernel to load, the power consumption characteristics of these two cases are considered with and without the inclusion of the power overhead associated with the integration of a cooling fan
This paper has presented a detailed systematic methodology for sensing and capturing power consumption measurements associated with the latest generation of Raspberry Pi singleboard computer, the Raspberry Pi4 model B
Summary
In today’s global society, the challenges faced in climate change have been at the forefront of discussion for several decades and are even more prevalent, and have included a focus on societal energy consumption. The prevalence and ubiquitous nature of embedded devices, for example; those embedded within and across a wide range of systems/appliances, including consumer and home appliances such as microwave ovens, dishwashers, cookers, fridge freezers, home heating systems; consumer electronics such as mobile phones, digital cameras, desktop printers; medical applications; automotive systems such as collision avoidance systems, braking system, fuel monitoring systems, and even window wiper speed, for example. All these devices are executing code and consuming ever-increasing amounts of energy.
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