Energy-performance trade-offs on energy-constrained devices with multi-component DVFS

Battery lifetime continues to be a top complaint about smart phones. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has existed for mobile device CPUs for some time, and provides a trade off between energy and performance. Dynamic frequency scaling is beginning to be applied to memory as well to make more energy-performance tradeoffs possible. We present the first characterization of the behavior of the optimal frequency settings of workloads running both, under energy constraints and on systems capable of CPU DVFS and memory DFS, an environment representative of next-generation mobile devices. Our results show that continuously using the optimal frequency settings results in a large number of frequency transitions which end up hurting performance. However, by permitting a small loss in performance, transition overhead can be reduced and end-to-end performance and energy consumption improved. We introduce the idea of inefficiency as a way of constraining task energy consumption relative to the most energy-efficient settings, and characterize the performance of multiple workloads running under different inefficiency settings. Overall our results have multiple implications for next-generation mobile devices exposing multiple energy-performance tradeoffs.