Abstract
Mobile computing devices demand processors to offer a wide range of performance/power trade-offs so that they can provide much needed high performance or low power consumption depending on a given operating requirement. While dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) has been the most powerful technique to provide such trade-offs, few processor vendors have the capability to provide a sufficient DVFS range requiring joint optimization of devices and circuits. Facing such a challenge, two promising approaches are proposed: scaling the amount of processor resources such as on-chip memory and execution units, i.e., dynamic resource scaling (DRS) and switching between big out-of-order (OoO) and little in-order cores in a single-ISA heterogeneous processor such as ARM's big. LITTLE. In this paper, we compare a single-ISA heterogeneous processor with a wide dynamic range (WDR) processor augmented with DRS in terms of (1) device-, circuit-, architecture-level implications, (2) design challenges, (3) area, (4) performance, and (5) energy efficiency. We evaluate a big. LITTLE processor (as a representative of single-ISA heterogeneous processor) based on Cortex-A15/A7 and a WDR processor based on Cortex-A15 running various mobile and SPEC2006 benchmarks. Our experiments demonstrate that the WDR processor combined with DRS can deliver energy efficiency close to the single-ISA heterogeneous processor, depending on the power overhead of circuit implementation to provide the wide DVFS range.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, ICCD 2015 |
Publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. |
Pages | 304-310 |
Number of pages | 7 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781467371650 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 14 2015 |
Event | 33rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, ICCD 2015 - New York City, United States Duration: Oct 18 2015 → Oct 21 2015 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, ICCD 2015 |
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Other
Other | 33rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, ICCD 2015 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | New York City |
Period | 10/18/15 → 10/21/15 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015 IEEE.