28nm high-K metal gate heterogeneous quad-core CPUs for high-performance and energy-efficient mobile application processor

Abstract

This paper presents a heterogeneous configuration of two different target quad-core CPUs. To support both high-performance and high energy-efficiency depending on application requirements, two types of quad-core CPUs are implemented in one mobile application processor. The first type quad-core CPU is designed to give the highest performance at the cost of reasonable power consumption. The second type quad-core CPU is optimized with emphasis on energy efficiency than high performance. This paper addresses the design features for high-performance quad-core CPU and the design optimization issue for low-power quad-core CPU. The best performance shows 1.8X of performance at the lowest power. The lowest power is reduced to 1/5 of power at the highest performance. Our heterogeneous configuration of separate implementations can be a more efficient solution for different power and performance requirements of various mobile applications.