Reducing peak power with a table-driven adaptive processor core

The increasing power dissipation of current processors and processor cores constrains design options, increases packaging and cooling costs, increases power delivery costs, and decreases reliability. Much research has been focused on decreasing average power dissipation, which most directly addresses cooling costs and reliability. However, much less has been done to decrease peak power, which most directly impacts the processor design, packaging, and power delivery. This research proposes a new architecture which provides a significant decrease in peak power with limited performance loss. It does this through the use of a highly adaptive processor. Many components of the processor can be configured at different levels, but because they are centrally controlled, the architecture can guarantee that they are never all configured maximally at the same time. This paper describes this adaptive processor and explores mechanisms for transitioning between allowed configurations to maximize...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Vasileios Kontorinis, Amirali Shayan, Dean M. Tullsen, Rakesh Kumar
• Keywords: Hardware, MICRO 2009, Peak Power, Power Delivery, Power Dissipation