Instructions energy consumption on a heterogeneous multicore platform

Today more than ever, energy and power distribution on heterogeneous multicore platforms have immense influence on hardware and software architectures because of general tendencies towards energy efficient solutions. This paper provides an insight into the overall energy and power distribution on an ultra-low power heterogeneous multicore platform designed for hearing aids, especially focusing on energy dissipation that is caused by instructions execution. This research has been conducted in order to provide instruction set energy profile that could be used during instructions selection for both developer and compiler. Also, information about instructions energy consumption could be used for power profiling of entire firmware solutions, therefore providing valuable feedback to developers. Experiments have been conducted using customized Eclipse based Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the toolchain (Compiler, Assembler, Linker) developed for that particular target platform, and true RMS multimeter used for measurements. The outcome of the experiments has unequivocally confirmed that the obtained instruction set energy profile provides reliable information that could be used in various ways.