TSP: thermal safe power

Abstract

Chip manufacturers provide the Thermal Design Power (TDP) for a specific chip. The cooling solution is designed to dissipate this power level. But because TDP is not necessarily the maximum power that can be applied, chips are operated with Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) techniques. To avoid excessive triggers of DTM, usually, system designers also use TDP as power constraint. However, using a single and constant value as power constraint, e.g., TDP, can result in big performance losses in many-core systems. Having better power budgeting techniques is a major step towards dealing with the dark silicon problem.