Dynamic Thermal Management for High-Performance Microprocessors
HPCA '01 Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
Temperature control is an important requirement for modern computer systems, especially for laptops and small form-factor desktops with limited choices for active cooling. Hardware approaches to thermal management include the use of clock gating and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. However, the indiscriminate use of these techniques can hamper performance of all processes running on a system regardless of their individual contributions to the thermal output. A modification to the Linux kernel that applies these techniques only when non-interactive processes are running is investigated and shown to provide effective dynamic thermal management with no performance impact on interactive processes. Pentium-M processors with the Enhanced SpeedStep feature are attractive platforms for this type of software-based approach because of their support for multiple paired frequency/voltage points which allow for multiple levels of temperature control.