Predictive dynamic thermal management for multimedia applications

Abstract

Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) techniques have been proposed to save on thermal packaging and cooling costs for general-purpose processors. However, when invoked, these techniques result in a significant performance degradation. This paper concerns performance-effective DTM for multimedia applications. We make two contributions: (1) Current DTM algorithms are reactive in nature. We propose a predictive DTM algorithm targeted at multimedia applications, which allows the efficient use of response mechanisms that have high invocation overhead. We find that for our applications, our predictive algorithm performs significantly better than existing reactive DTM algorithms. (2) We evaluate the effectiveness of different DTM response mechanisms. Specifically, we demonstrate the importance of tailoring DTM response mechanisms to the thermal "hot-spots" on the chip and the current thermal limit, and show that a predictive combination of architecture adaptation and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) performs the best across a broad range of applications and thermal limits.