Measuring power and temperature from real processors

Abstract

The modeling of power and thermal behavior of modern processors requires challenging validation approaches, which may be complex and in some cases unreliable. In order to address some of the difficulties associated with the validation of power and thermal models, this document describes an infrared measurement setup that simultaneously captures run-time power consumption and thermal characteristics of a processor. We use infrared cameras with high spatial resolution (10 x 10 mum) and high frame rate (125 Hz) to capture thermal maps. Power measurements are obtained with a multimeter at a sampling rate of 1 K Hz. The synchronized traces can then be used in the validation process of possible thermal and power processor activity models.