Limiting the power consumption of main memory

The peak power consumption of hardware components affects their power supply, packaging, and cooling requirements. When the peak power consumption is high, the hardware components or the systems that use them can become expensive and bulky. Given that components and systems rarely (if ever) actually require peak power, it is highly desirable to limit power consumption to a lessthan-peak power budget, based on which power supply, packaging, and cooling infrastructures can be more intelligently provisioned. In this paper, we study dynamic approaches for limiting the power consumption of main memories. Specifically, we propose four techniques that limit consumption by adjusting the power states of the memory devices, as a function of the load on the memory subsystem. Our simulations of applications from three benchmarks demonstrate that our techniques can consistently limit power to a pre-established budget. Two of the techniques can limit power with very low performance degradation. Ou...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Bruno Diniz, Dorgival Olavo Guedes Neto, Wagner Meira Jr., Ricardo Bianchini
• Keywords: Hardware, ISCA 2007, Peak Power Consumption, Power Consumption, Power Supply