Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling for shared resources in multicore processor designs

Abstract

As the core count in processor chips grows, so do the on-die, shared resources such as on-chip communication fabric and shared cache, which are of paramount importance for chip performance and power. This paper presents a method for dynamic voltage/frequency scaling of networks-on-chip and last level caches in multicore processor designs, where the shared resources form a single voltage/frequency domain. Several new techniques for monitoring and control are developed, and validated through full system simulations on the PARSEC benchmarks. These techniques reduce energy-delay product by 56% compared to a state-of-the-art prior work.