Dynamic frequency and voltage control for a multiple clock domain microarchitecture

  • Authors:
  • Greg Semeraro;David H. Albonesi;Steven G. Dropsho;Grigorios Magklis;Sandhya Dwarkadas;Michael L. Scott

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Rochester, Rochester, NY;University of Rochester, Rochester, NY;University of Rochester, Rochester, NY;University of Rochester, Rochester, NY;University of Rochester, Rochester, NY;University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 35th annual ACM/IEEE international symposium on Microarchitecture
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We describe the design, analysis, and performance of an on--line algorithm to dynamically control the frequency/voltage of a Multiple Clock Domain (MCD) microarchitecture. The MCD microarchitecture allows the frequency/voltage of microprocessor regions to be adjusted independently and dynamically, allowing energy savings when the frequency of some regions can be reduced without significantly impacting performance.Our algorithm achieves on average a 19.0% reduction in Energy Per Instruction (EPI), a 3.2% increase in Cycles Per Instruction (CPI), a 16.7% improvement in Energy--Delay Product, and a Power Savings to Performance Degradation ratio of 4.6. Traditional frequency/voltage scaling techniques which apply reductions globally to a fully synchronous processor achieve a Power Savings to Performance Degradation ratio of only 2--3. Our Energy--Delay Product improvement is 85.5% of what has been achieved using an off--line algorithm. These results were achieved using a broad range of applications from the MediaBench, Olden, and Spec2000 benchmark suites using an algorithm we show to require minimal hardware resources.