Adaptive Power Delivery System Management for Many-Core Processors with On/Off-Chip Voltage Regulators
Haoran Lia, Jiang Xub, Zhe Wang, Peng Yang, Rafael K. V. Maeda and Zhongyuan Tian
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
ahr.li@ust.hk
bjiang.xu@ust.hk
ABSTRACT
The power delivery system (PDS) plays a crucial role of guaranteeing the proper functionality of many-core processors. However, as PDS is usually optimized to provide power to the target chip at its best performance level, its energy efficiency can be seriously degraded under highly dynamic workloads, making it a major source of system power losses. On-chip voltage regulators (VR), which are able to achieve fast and fine-grained power control, have been popular choices for PDS implementation and provided design opportunities for improving system energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose the adaptive Quantized Power Management (QPM) scheme to dynamically adjust the PDS with both on-chip and off-chip VRs based on runtime workloads. Experimental results on different applications show that QPM applied on a hybrid PDS with both on/off-chip voltage regulators (VR) achieves 74.1% average overall energy efficiency, 12.3% higher than the conventional PDS with single off-chip VR.
