Efficient microarchitecture policies for accurately adapting to power constraints

Abstract

In the past years dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has been an effective technique that allowed microprocessors to match a predefined power budget. However, as process technology shrinks, DVFS becomes less effective (because of the increasing leakage power) and it is getting closer to a point where DVFS won't be useful at all (when static power exceeds dynamic power). In this paper we propose the use of microarchitectural techniques to accurately match a power constraint while maximizing the energy efficiency of the processor. We predict the processor power consumption at a basic block level, using the consumed power translated into tokens to select between different power-saving micro-architectural techniques. These techniques are orthogonal to DVFS so they can be simultaneously applied. We propose a two-level approach where DVFS acts as a coarse-grained technique to lower the average power while microarchitectural techniques remove all the power spikes efficiently. Experimental results show that the use of power-saving microarchitectural techniques in conjunction with DVFS is up to six times more precise, in terms of total energy consumed (area) over the power budget, than using DVFS alone for matching a predefined power budget. Furthermore, in a near future DVFS will become DFS because lowering the supply voltage will be too expensive in terms of leakage power. At that point, the use of power-saving microarchitectural techniques will become even more energy efficient.