Introducing the Adaptive Energy Management Features of the Power7 Chip

Abstract

Power7 implements several new adaptive power management techniques which, in concert with the EnergyScale firmware, let it proactively exploit variations in workload, environmental conditions, and overall system use to meet customer-directed power and performance goals. These innovative features include per-core frequency scaling with available autonomic frequency control, per-chip automated voltage slewing, power consumption estimation, and hardware instrumentation assist.