Quantifying Process Variations and Its Impacts on Smartphones

Guru Prasad Srinivasa, Scott Haseley, Geoffrey Challen, Mark Hempstead

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Process variation can cause the performance and energy consumption of smartphones of the same model to vary significantly. While process variation has been studied in detail, the effects on smartphone performance have not been quantified and evaluated. In this work we study the performance and energy differences of 5 recent SoC generations caused by underlying process variation. We make two important contributions. First, we present a methodology to construct a temperature-stabilized environment to perform repeatable power and performance measurements. Studying power-performance characteristics of smartphones is difficult. Running a benchmark back-to-back often produces significantly different results due to heat. Temperature, both device and ambient, play a significant role in determining performance and energy. Our methodology allows us to control for various factors and isolate the effects of the underlying process variation. We then apply our methodology to investigate performance and energy characteristics of several recent generations of smart-phone CPUs that result from process variation. Our results show that devices of the same model may exhibit differences of 10% and 12% difference in performance and energy over a fixed-duration workload.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, ISPASS 2019
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages117-126
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728107462
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 22 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event2019 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, ISPASS 2019 - Madison, United States
Duration: Mar 24 2019Mar 26 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, ISPASS 2019

Conference

Conference2019 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software, ISPASS 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMadison
Period3/24/193/26/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Software
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

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