Abstract

Power consumption has long been a limiting factor in microprocessor design. In seeking energy efficiency solutions, dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS), a technique to vary voltage/frequency on the fly, has emerged as a powerful and practical power/energy reduction technique that exploits computation slack due to relaxed deadlines and memory accesses. DVFS has been implemented in some modern processors such as Intel XScale and Transmeta Crusoe. Hence the bulk of research efforts have been devoted to developing policies to detect slack and pick appropriate V/f assignments such that the energy is minimized while meeting performance requirements. Since slack is a product of memory accesses and relaxed deadlines, the number of instances and the duration of available slack are highly dependent on the runtime program behavior. Runtime DVFS policies must take into consideration program characteristics in order to achieve significant energy savings. In this paper, we characterize program behavior and classify programs in terms of the memory access behavior. We propose a runtime DVFS policy that takes into consideration the characteristics of program behavior for each category. Then we examine the efficiency of the proposed DVFS policies by comparing with previously derived upper bounds of energy savings. Results show that the proposed run-time DVFS policies approach the upper bounds of energy savings in most cases

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCODES+ISSS 2005 - International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and Systems Synthesis
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages105-110
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)1595931619, 9781595931610
DOIs
StatePublished - 2005
Event3rd IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and Systems Synthesis CODES+ISSS 2005 - Jersey City, NJ, United States
Duration: Sep 18 2005Sep 21 2005

Publication series

NameCODES+ISSS 2005 - International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis

Other

Other3rd IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and Systems Synthesis CODES+ISSS 2005
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityJersey City, NJ
Period9/18/059/21/05

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

Keywords

  • Low Power
  • Runtime Dynamic Voltage Scaling

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Efficient behavior-driven runtime dynamic voltage scaling policies'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this