Control Techniques to Eliminate Voltage Emergencies in High Performance Processors

Increasing focus on power dissipation issues in current microprocessors has led to a host of proposals for clock gating and other power-saving techniques. While generally effective at reducing average power, many of these techniques have the undesired side-effect of increasing both the variability of power dissipation and the variability of current drawn by the processor. This increase in current variability, often referred to as the dI/dt problem, can cause supply voltage fluctuations. Such voltage fluctuations lead to unreliable circuits if not addressed, and increasingly expensive chip packaging techniques are needed to mitigate them. This paper proposes and evaluates a methodology for augmenting packaging techniques for dI/dt with microarchitectural control mechanisms. We discuss the resonant frequencies most relevant to current microprocessor packages, produce and evaluate a "dI/dt stressmark" that exercises the system at its resonant frequency, and characterize the beh...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: Russ Joseph, David Brooks, Margaret Martonosi
• Keywords: Computer Architecture, HPCA 2003, Such Voltage Fluctuations, Supply Voltage Fluctuations, Voltage Control Techniques