(Paper #175)
Thermal power management is an important area of reasearch for general-purpose processors. In order to save on chip packaging costs, Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) techniques have been proposed. However, these techniques result in a degradation in processor performance when invoked. This paper concerns performance effective DTM for general-purpose processors running multimedia applications. Current DTM algorithms are reactive in nature. We propose a predictive DTM algorithm targeted at multimedia applications. We find that for our applications, our predictive algorithm performs significantly better than existing reactive DTM algorithms. We also demonstrate the importance of tailoring DTM response mechanisms to the thermal "hot-spots" on the chip.
Keywords:
Digital Video, Animation and Multimedia
Architecture
Other