Independent front-end and back-end dynamic voltage scaling for a GALS microarchitecture

Abstract

In recent years, Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) designs and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) have emerged as some of the most popular approaches to address the ever increasing microprocessor energy consumption. In this work, we propose two on-line algorithms for adjusting dynamically, and independently, the voltage and frequency of the front-end and back-end domains of a novel two-domain microprocessor. We evaluate our mechanisms for both internal and external voltage regulators, and we present optimal dynamic voltage scaling results for the proposed microarchitecture. Our schemes achieve average improvement of 12% of the energy-delay2 metric, when using internal voltage regulators.