Dynamic reduction of voltage margins by leveraging on-chip ECC in Itanium II processors

Lowering supply voltage is one of the most effective approaches for improving the energy efficiency of microprocessors. Unfortunately, technology limitations, such as process variability and circuit aging, are forcing microprocessor designers to add larger voltage guardbands to their chips. This makes supply voltage increasingly difficult to scale with technology. This paper presents a new mechanism for dynamically reducing voltage margins while maintaining the chip operating frequency constant. Unlike previous approaches that rely on special hardware to detect and recover from timing violations caused by low-voltage execution, our solution is firmware-based and does not require additional hardware. Instead, it relies on error correction mechanisms already built into modern processors. The system dynamically reduces voltage margins and uses correctable error reports raised by the hardware to identify the lowest, safe operating voltage. The solution adapts to core-to-core variability by tailoring supply voltage to each core's safe operating level. In addition, it exploits variability in workload vulnerability to low voltage execution. The system was prototyped on an HP Integrity Server that uses Intel's Itanium 9560 processors. Evaluation using SPECjbb2005 and SPEC CPU2000 workloads shows core power savings ranging from 18% to 23%, with minimal performance impact.