High-Performance & Low-Power Microarchitectures

• Enric Musoll, ConSentry Networks Inc.
• Efraim Rotem, Intel Corp.

Speaker bios

Abstract

In the first part of this tutorial, we will look at why power consumption has become a design constraint as important as area and performance. The different sources of power consumption will be explained along with the reason why power consumption will keep increasing in the next process generations. We will then review the most recent techniques proposed by the research community to tackle the power consumption in a high-performance processor.

We will classify those techniques based on what resource of the processor they target. Time permitting, we will also take a peek at the consequences that the power consumption of the processors has in a data center. In the second part of the tutorial, we will provide details on mobile systems cooling challenges and talk in detail the power and thermal management and control of the Intel Centrino as an example of a real power aware architecture.

Outline

1 - Motivation
      - Battery life
      - Reliability
      - Cost
      - Process tendencies
2 - Sources
      - Dynamic
      - Static
         - Subthreshold
         - Gate leakage
3 - Metrics
      - Max, Average, Peak power
      - Energy
      - Thermal design power
      - Power density
      - Power-Delay
      - Energy-Delay
      - Temperature
      - Power envelope
4 - Architecture
      - Power efficiency
      - Wasted power
      - Single vs. multi core
      - Memory vs. logic
      - CISC vs RISC
5 - Micro-architecture
      - Fetch/Decoder
      - Branch predictor
      - Dispatch/Issue
      - Functional units
      - Register file
      - Reorder buffer
      - Caches
      - TLB
      - DRAM
      - I/O bus
      - Clock
      - Interconnect
6 - Mobile platform challenges
      - Power "Moor's low"
      - CPU power evolution
      - Mobile platform challenges (thermal technologies, 
        thermodynamic limits, platform impacts, acoustics, 
        skin temp etc.)
      - Energy consumption
7 - Power and thermal management - The Centrino example
      - "virus" vs. TDP
      - Measuring die temperature
      - Thermal control (Thermal throttle TM1 and TM2, GV3, ACPI)
      - Power management (C states)
      - Adaptive power schemes
8- Real time demo
      - Demonstrating thermal control, power management and 
        workloads impacts.