A Temperature-Aware Power Estimation Methodology (original) (raw)

A Fast Concurrent Power-Thermal Model for Sub-100nm Digital ICs

Design, Automation and Test in Europe, 2005

As technology scales down, the static power is expected to become a significant fraction of the total power. The exponential dependence of static power with the operating temperature makes the thermal profile estimation of highperformance ICs a key issue to compute the total power dissipated in next-generations. In this paper we present accurate and compact analytical models to estimate the static power dissipation and the temperature of operation of CMOS gates. The models are the fundamentals of a performance estimation tool in which numerical procedures are avoided for any computation to set a faster estimation and optimization. The models developed are compared to measurements and SPICE simulations for a 0.12µm technology showing excellent results.

Towards a Cross-Layer Framework for Accurate Power Modeling of Microprocessor Designs

2018 28th International Symposium on Power and Timing Modeling, Optimization and Simulation (PATMOS), 2018

While state-of-the-art system-level simulators can deliver swift estimation of power dissipation for microprocessor designs, they do so at the expense of reduced accuracy. On the other hand, RTL simulators are typically cycle-accurate but overwhelmingly time consuming for real-life workloads. Consequently, the design community often has to make a compromise between accuracy and speed. In this work, we propose a novel cross-layer approach that can enable accurate power estimation by carefully integrating components from system-level and RTL simulation of the target design. We first leverage the concept of simulation points to transform the workload application and isolate its most critical segments. We then profile the highest weighted simulation point (HWSP) with a RTL simulator (AnyCore) for maximum accuracy, while the rest are simulated with a system-level simulator (gem5) for ensuring fast evaluation. Finally, we combine the integrated set of profiling data as input to the power simulator (McPAT). Our evaluation results for three different SPEC2006 benchmark applications demonstrate that our proposed crosslayer framework can improve the power estimation accuracy by up to 15% for individual simulation points and by ∼9% for the full application, compared to that of a conventional system-level simulation scheme.

Modeling the temperature bias of power consumption for nanometer-scale CPUs in application processors

2014 International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation (SAMOS XIV), 2014

We introduce and experimentally validate a new macro-level model of the CPU temperature/power relationship within nanometer-scale application processors or system-onchips. By adopting a holistic view, this model is able to take into account many of the physical effects that occur within such systems. Together with two algorithms described in the paper, our results can be used, for instance by engineers designing power or thermal management units, to cancel the temperatureinduced bias on power measurements. This will help them gather temperature-neutral power data while running multiple instance of their benchmarks. Also power requirements and system failure rates can be decreased by controlling the CPU's thermal behavior.

CAPE: A cross-layer framework for accurate microprocessor power estimation

Integration, 2019

State-of-the-art system-level simulators can deliver fast power estimates for microprocessor designs, but often at the expense of reduced accuracy. The inaccuracies mainly stem from incorrect or oversimplified modeling of the target architecture. On the other hand, modern register-transfer level (RTL) simulators are cycle-accurate but overwhelmingly time consuming for most real-life workloads. Consequently, the design community often has to make a compromise between accuracy and speed. In this work, we propose a novel cross-layer power estimation (CAPE) technique that carefully integrates system-level and RTL profiling data for the target design in order to attain better accuracy. Our proposed methodology first leverages the SimPoint tool to transform a workload into weighted simulation points. We, then, present two different strategies to represent the critical segment of an application-either with a workload-specific simulation point (CAPE-WSSP) or, with the highestweighted simulation point (CAPE-HWSP). Next, we profile the critical simulation point with an RTL simulator for maximum accuracy, while the other simulation points are simulated at system-level for fast evaluation. Finally, we input the integrated set of profiling data to the power simulator (McPAT). Our evaluation results show that CAPE can improve the power estimation accuracy by up to 15% for individual simulation points and by ∼8% for the full application, compared to that of a system-level only simulation scheme while adding minimal runtime overhead.

A New Thermal-Conscious System-Level Methodology for Energy-Efficient Processor Voltage Selection

APCCAS 2006 - 2006 IEEE Asia Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems, 2006

In this paper, we propose a thermal-conscious system-level methodology to make energy-efficient voltage selection (VS) for nanometer processors under real-time constraints. New modeling parameters, such as power composition ratio (PCR), thermal resistance, are integrated and considered in our system models, and their impacts on energy consumption are explored. The interdependence between temperature and power is modeled in an iterative way and two nonlinear programming formulations are presented to determine the optimal energy-efficient supply voltages. Our experiment results show that the energy estimation discrepancy given by the thermal-conscious and traditional system models can reach up to 50% in 65nm PTM CMOS technology, which again underscores the necessity of a thermal-aware power model. Furthermore, our thermalconscious voltage selection (TCVS) approach can achieve up to 12% further energy savings and much lower peak temperature than the traditional approach. Finally, our specific temperature voltage selection (STVS) approach can reduce the computation complexity greatly with acceptable energy overheads compared with TCVS.

Power-aware microarchitecture: Design and modeling challenges for next-generation microprocessors

2000

Abstract The ability to estimate power consumption during early-stage definition and trade-off studies is a key new methodology enhancement. Opportunities for saving power can be exposed via microarchitecture-level modeling, particularly through clock-gating and dynamic adaptation. In this paper we describe the approach of using energy-enabled performance simulators in early design. We examine some of the emerging paradigms in processor design and comment on their inherent power-performance characteristics

A Self-Consistent Substrate Thermal Profile Estimation Technique for Nanoscale ICs—Part II: Implementation and Implications for Power Estimation and Thermal Management

IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 2000

As transistors continue to evolve along Moore's Law and silicon devices take advantage of this evolution to offer increasing performance, there is a critical need to accurately estimate the silicon-substrate (junction or die) thermal gradients and temperature profile for the development and thermal management of future generations of all high-performance integrated circuits (ICs) including microprocessors. This paper presents an accurate chip-level leakage-aware method that self-consistently incorporates various electrothermal couplings between chip power, junction temperature, operating frequency, and supply voltage for substrate thermal profile estimation and also employs a realistic package thermal model that comprehends different packaging layers and noncubic structure of the package, which are not accounted for in traditional analyses. The evaluation using the proposed methodology is efficient and shows excellent agreements with an industrial-quality computational-fluid-dynamics (CFD) based commercial software. Furthermore, the methodology is shown to become increasingly effective with increase in leakage as technology scales. It is shown that considering electrothermal couplings and realistic package thermal model not only improves the accuracy of estimating the heat distribution across the chip but also has significant implications for precise power estimation and thermal management in nanometer-scale CMOS technologies.

SEA: fast power estimation for micro-architectures

2003 5th International Conference on ASIC Proceedings (IEEE Cat No 03TH8690) ICASIC-03, 2003

Various approaches for micro-architectural power/ energy estimation have been introduced, mainly driven by the need to obtain fast power/energy estimates during early phases of complex SOC designs. In contrast to previous approaches we study power/energy estimation for highly optimized synthesizable description of microprocessor cores. Under this real-world design scenario, we found, unlike related previous research, that power can hardly be estimated closer than around 15% using an instruction level model. However, we can estimate the energy as close as 5%. Our research has resulted in the SEA framework that estimates energy/power consumed by a software program, taking specific micro-architectural features of the underlying programmable hardware core into consideration. With this high accuracy in energy estimation we achieve around 5 orders of magnitude faster estimations compared to state-of-the art high-level (RTL) commercial energy/power estimation tool suites. Thus, our framework is capable of reliably estimating the energy/power consumption of future complex SOCs.

AccuPower: An accurate power estimation tool for superscalar microprocessors

2002

This paper describes the AccuPower toolset -a set of simulation tools accurately estimating the power dissipation within a superscalar microprocessor. AccuPower uses a true hardware level and cycle level microarchitectural simulator and energy dissipation coefficients gleaned from SPICE measurements of actual CMOS layouts of critical datapath components. Transition counts can be obtained at the level of bits within data and instruction streams, at the level of registers, or at the level of larger building blocks (such as caches, issue queue, reorder buffer, function units). This allows for an accurate estimation of switching activity at any desired level of resolution.

Enabling accurate modeling of power and energy consumption in an ARM-based System-on-Chip

Microprocessors and Microsystems, 2013

Motivated by the importance of energy consumption in mobile electronics this work describes a methodology developed at ARM for power modeling and energy estimation in complex System-on-Chips (SoCs). The approach is based on developing statistical power models for the system components using regression analysis and extends previous work that has mainly focused on microprocessor cores. The power models are derived from post-layout power-estimation data, after exploring the high-level activity space of each component. The models are then used to conduct an energy analysis based on realistic use cases including web browser benchmarks and multimedia algorithms running on a dual-core processor under Linux. The obtained results show the effects of different hardware configurations on power and energy for a given application and that system level energy consumption analysis can help the design team to make informed architectural trade-offs during the design process.