Fast energy evaluation of embedded applications for many-core systems

Abstract

The growing concerns of energy efficiency and performance scalability motivate research in the area of many-core embedded systems. The software development of such systems plays an important role on the system performance, while accounting for a significant part of the total energy consumption. Thus, it becomes imperative to consider the software energy consumption at early stages of the software development. This paper proposes an instruction-driven energy analysis approach that provides an accurate and practical way of evaluating software energy cost at the speed of up to 1.8 MIPS. Results show that the accuracy of our approach varies from 0.06% to 8.05% when compared to a gate-level implementation.