Optimizing throughput of power- and thermal-constrained multicore processors using DVFS and per-core power-gating

Process variability from a range of sources is growing as technology scales below 65nm, resulting in increasingly nonuniform transistor delay and leakage power both within a die and across dies. As a result, the negative impact of process variations on the maximum operating frequency and the total power consumption of a processor is expected to worsen. Meanwhile, manufacturers have integrated more cores in a single die, substantially improving the throughput of a processor running highly-parallel applications. However, many existing applications do not have high enough parallelism to exploit multiple cores in a die. In this paper, first, we analyze the throughput impact of applying per-core power gating and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling to power- and thermal-constrained multicore processors. To optimize the throughput of the multicore processors running applications with limited parallelism, we exploit power- and thermal-headroom resulted from power-gated idle cores, allowing active cores to increase operating frequency through supply voltage scaling. Our analysis using a 32nm predictive technology model shows that optimizing the number of active cores and operating frequency within power, thermal, and supply voltage scaling limits improves the throughput of a 16-core processor by ~16%. Furthermore, we extend our throughput analysis and optimization to consider the impact of within-die process variations leading to core-to-core frequency (and leakage power) variations in a multicore processor. Our analysis shows that exploiting core-to-core frequency variations improves the throughput of a 16-core processor by ∼75%.