@inproceedings{b71c900156b142e695c88299e36aa7ec,
title = "Cost-effective power delivery to support per-core voltage domains for power-constrained processors",
abstract = "Per-core voltage domains can improve performance under a power constraint. Most commercial processors, however, only have one chip-wide voltage domain because splitting the voltage domain into per-core voltage domains and powering them with multiple off-chip voltage regulators (VRs) incurs a high cost for the platform and package designs. Although using on-chip switching VRs can be an alternative solution, integrating high-quality inductors and cores on the same chip has been a technical challenge. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective power delivery technique to support per-core voltage domains. Our technique is based on the observations that (i) core-to-core voltage variations are relatively small for most execution intervals when the voltages/frequencies are optimized to maximize performance under a power constraint and (ii) per-core power-gating devices augmented with small circuits can serve as low-cost VRs that can provide high efficiency in situations like (i). Our experimental results show that processors using our technique can achieve power efficiency as high as those using per-core on-chip switching VRs at much lower cost.",
keywords = "multi-core processors, power delivery, voltage regulators",
author = "Ghasemi, {Hamid Reza} and Sinkar, {Abhishek A.} and Schulte, {Michael J.} and Kim, {Nam Sung}",
year = "2012",
doi = "10.1145/2228360.2228372",
language = "English (US)",
isbn = "9781450311991",
series = "Proceedings - Design Automation Conference",
pages = "56--61",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 49th Annual Design Automation Conference, DAC '12",
note = "49th Annual Design Automation Conference, DAC '12 ; Conference date: 03-06-2012 Through 07-06-2012",
}