Dynamic Frequency and Voltage Scaling for a Multiple-Clock-Domain Microprocessor

Sandhya Dwarkadas
2003
Article

Résumé

Multiple clock domains is one solution to the increasing problem of propagating the clock signal across increasingly larger and faster chips. The ability to independently scale frequency and voltage in each domain creates a powerful means of reducing power dissipation.

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https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/97169?ln=fr

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Publications associées (2)

Profile-based Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling for a Multiple Clock Domain Microprocessor

A Multiple Clock Domain (MCD) processor addresses the challenges of clock distribution and power dissipation by dividing a chip into several (coarse-grained) clock domains, allowing frequency and voltage to be reduced in domains that are not currently on the application’s critical path. Given a reconfiguration mechanism capable of choosing appropriate times and values for voltage/frequency scaling, an MCD processor has the potential to achieve significant energy savings with low performance degradation. Early work on MCD processors evaluated the potential for energy savings by manually inserting reconfiguration instructions into applications, or by employing an oracle driven by off-line analysis of (identical) prior program runs. Subsequent work developed a hardware-based on-line mechanism that averages 75–85% of the energy-delay improvement achieved via off-line analysis. In this paper we consider the automatic insertion of reconfiguration instructions into applications, using profiledriven binary rewriting. Profile-based reconfiguration introduces the need for “training runs” prior to production use of a given application, but avoids the hardware complexity of on-line reconfiguration. It also has the potential to yield significantly greater energy savings. Experimental results (training on small data sets and then running on larger, alternative data sets) indicate that the profile-driven approach is more stable than hardware-based reconfiguration, and yields virtually all of the energy-delay improvement achieved via off-line analysis.

2003

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Static timing analysis provides the basis for setting the clock period of a microprocessor core, based on its worst-case critical path. However, depending on the design, this critical path is not always excited and therefore dynamic timing margins exist that can theoretically be exploited for the benefit of better speed or lower power consumption (through voltage scaling). This paper introduces predictive instruction-based dynamic clock adjustment as a technique to trim dynamic timing margins in pipelined microprocessors. To this end, we exploit the different timing requirements for individual instructions during the dynamically varying program execution flow without the need for complex circuit-level measures to detect and correct timing violations. We provide a design flow to extract the dynamic timing information for the design using post-layout dynamic timing analysis and we integrate the results into a custom cycle-accurate simulator. This simulator allows annotation of individual instructions with their impact on timing (in each pipeline stage) and rapidly derives the overall code execution time for complex benchmarks. The design methodology is illustrated at the microarchitecture level, demonstrating the performance and power gains possible on a 6-stage OpenRISC in-order general purpose processor core in a 28nm CMOS technology. We show that employing instruction-dependent dynamic clock adjustment leads on average to an increase in operating speed by 38% or to a reduction in power consumption by 24%, compared to traditional synchronous clocking, which at all times has to respect the worst-case timing identified through static timing analysis.

2015

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