Dynamic Power Budgeting for Mobile Systems Running Graphics Workloads

Abstract

Competitive graphics performance is crucial for the success of state-of-the-art mobile processors. High graphics performance comes at the cost of higher power consumption, which elevates the temperature due to limited cooling solutions. To avoid thermal violations, the system needs to operate within a power budget. Since the power budget is a shared resource, there is a strong demand for effective dynamic power budgeting techniques. This paper presents a novel technique to efficiently distribute the power budget among the CPU and GPU cores, while maximizing performance. The proposed technique is evaluated using a state-of-the-art mobile platform using industrial benchmarks, and an in-house simulator. The experiments on the mobile platform show up to 15% increase in average frame rate compared to default power allocation algorithms.