Workload-adaptive process tuning strategy for power-efficient multi-core processors

Abstract

As more devices are integrated with technology scaling, reducing the power consumption of both high-performance and low-power processors has become the first-class design constraint. Reducing power consumption while satisfying required performance is critical for increasing the operating time of mobile devices and lowering the operating cost of offices and data centers. Meanwhile, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and clock-gating (CG) techniques have been widely used for two of the most powerful techniques to reduce the power consumption of such processors. Depending on performance and power demands, a processor runs at various performance and power states to trade power with performance. In this paper, we propose process tuning strategy to minimize the average power consumption of multi-core processors that use the DVFS and CG techniques, while providing the same maximum performance. The proposed optimization method incorporates with workload characteristics of commercial high-performance and low-power multi-core processors. The experimental results show that our optimized 32nm technologies for workstation, mobile, and server multi-core processors minimize the average power by up to 13, 18, and 9%, respectively.