Understanding Power Gating Mechanism Based on Workload Classification of Modern Heterogeneous Many-Core Mobile Platform in the Dark Silicon Era

Abstract

The rapid progress in mobile computing necessitates energy efficient solutions to support substantially diverse and complex workloads. Heterogeneous many core platforms are progressively being adopted in contemporary embedded implementations for high performance at low power cost estimations. These implementations experience diverse workloads that offer drastic opportunities to improve energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel per core power gating (PCPG) approach based on workload classifications (WLC) for drastic energy cost minimization in the dark silicon era. Core of our paradigm is to use an integrated sleep mode management based on workloads classification indicated by the performance counters. A number of real applications benchmark (PARSEC) are adopted as a practical example of diverse workloads, including memory- and CPU-intensive ones. In this paper, these applications are exercised on Samsung Exynos 5422 heterogeneous many core system showing up to 37% to 110% energy efficient when compared with our most recent published work, and ondemand governor, respectively. Furthermore, we illustrate low-complexity and low-cost runtime per core power gating algorithm that consistently maximize IPS/Watt at all state space.