Flicker: a dynamically adaptive architecture for power limited multicore systems

Abstract

Future microprocessors may become so power constrained that not all transistors will be able to be powered on at once. These systems will be required to nimbly adapt to changes in the chip power that is allocated to general-purpose cores and to specialized accelerators. This paper presents Flicker, a general-purpose multicore architecture that dynamically adapts to varying and potentially stringent limits on allocated power. The Flicker core microarchitecture includes deconfigurable lanes--horizontal slices through the pipeline--that permit tailoring an individual core to the running application with lower overhead than microarchitecture-level adaptation, and greater flexibility than core-level power gating. To exploit Flicker's flexible pipeline architecture, a new online multicore optimization algorithm combines reduced sampling techniques, application of response surface models to online optimization, and heuristic online search. The approach efficiently finds a near-global-optimum configuration of lanes without requiring offline training, microarchitecture state, or foreknowledge of the workload. At high power allocations, core-level gating is highly effective, and slightly outperforms Flicker overall. However, under stringent power constraints, Flicker significantly outperforms core-level gating, achieving an average 27% performance improvement.