Power Modeling for GPU Architectures Using McPAT

Abstract

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are very popular for both graphics and general-purpose applications. Since GPUs operate many processing units and manage multiple levels of memory hierarchy, they consume a significant amount of power. Although several power models for CPUs are available, the power consumption of GPUs has not been studied much yet. In this article we develop a new power model for GPUs by utilizing McPAT, a CPU power tool. We generate initial power model data from McPAT with a detailed GPU configuration, and then adjust the models by comparing them with empirical data. We use the NVIDIA's Fermi architecture for building the power model, and our model estimates the GPU power consumption with an average error of 7.7% and 12.8% for the microbenchmarks and Merge benchmarks, respectively.