An energy-efficient graphics processor featuring fine-grain DVFS with integrated voltage regulators, execution-unit turbo, and retentive sleep in 14nm tri-gate CMOS

Meinerzhagen, Pascal; Tokunaga, Carlos; Malavasi, Andres; Vaidya, Vaibhav; Mendon, Ashwin A.; Mathaikutty, Deepak; Kulkarni, Jaydeep P.; Augustine, Charles; Cho, Minki; Kim, Stephen; Matthew, George E.; Jain, Rachna; Ryan, Joseph F.; Peng, Chung-Ching; Sauseng, Paul; Vangal, Sriram; Esparza, Brando Perez; Cuéllar, Luis; Woodman, Michael; Iyer, Balakrishnan; Maiyuran, Subramaniam; Chinya, Gautham N.; Zou, Chris B.; Liao, Yuan; Ravichandran, Krishnan; Wang, Hong; Khellah, Muhammad; Tschanz, James; De, Vivek

doi:10.1109/isscc.2018.8310172

Cited by 25 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…In fully integrated switching-capacitor converters, the flying capacitors could be implemented by the baseline MOS capacitors [29], deep trench capacitors [30], Metal-Oxide-Metal (MOM) capacitors [20] and Metal-Isolator-Metal (MIM) capacitors [8].…”

Section: B the Mim Capacitance Used In Sccsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the contrary, the MIM capacitor (typical density 1.6fF ∼ 1.9fF/µm 2 @65nm [33]) is fabricated between one upper metal layer and one additional metal layer above it, resulting in small capacitive coupling to the substrate [34]. Although the combined capacitors such as MIM and MOS capacitors [13], [35] are used together as flying capacitors in SCCs, in recent high-end processor chips [8], [18], [27] the MIM capacitors are widely used in the SCCs.…”

Section: B the Mim Capacitance Used In Sccsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, the Apple A12 processor [5] has two high-performance CPU cores, four energy-efficient CPU cores, four GPU cores and eight neural engine cores; The Kirin 980 processor [6] has two high-performance CPU cores, two medium-performance CPU cores, four efficiency CPU cores, one GPU core and two neural processor cores. The heterogeneous chip is typically divided into several power domains [7], and each domain can be powered individually by the integrated on-chip voltage regulators such as switching-capacitor converters (SCCs) [8], [9], inductive switching regulators [7], [10] and LDOs [11], [12] (see Fig. 1 for an example).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The energy efficiency of the SCC is related to its switching capacitance and conversion ratio (see Section III). Recently Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) capacitors have been utilized as flying capacitors for SCCs [8], [18], [27] (see MIM capacitance in Fig. 1), and more than one conversion ratios are available for a SCC to supply for the loads where the ideal output voltage of the conver- sion ratio is greater than the demanded voltage.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Early-Stage Planning of Switched-Capacitor Converters in a Heterogeneous Chip

Wang

Zhuo

et al. 2020

IEEE Access

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The switched-capacitor converter (SCC) has been widely used for voltage regulation in multicore chips, where energy efficiency is the major concern. However as the overhead to integrate SCCs in a chip is non-negligible, the SCCs could not be overused. Hence in this paper we propose an early stage SCCs planning framework to obtain the SCC supply scheme together with the optimized Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) capacitance allocation and converter ratio selection for each SCC when the given number of SCCs is less than the number of cores. Besides, our method could also explore to find the best number of used SCCs for a given chip. The experiments show the results of our SCC planning methods.

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Section: B the Mim Capacitance Used In Sccsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B the Mim Capacitance Used In Sccsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Early-Stage Planning of Switched-Capacitor Converters in a Heterogeneous Chip

Wang

Zhuo

et al. 2020

IEEE Access

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“…Architecture. To illustrate the usage of a PDN in modern client processors, we rst summarize the architecture of Intel's client processor [8,20,21,83,101] in Table 1. Similar architectures are widely used for modern processors from various vendors, such as AMD, IBM, and ARM [15,18,89,94,111,112,120].…”

Section: Pdns In Modern Client Processorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

FlexWatts: A Power- and Workload-Aware Hybrid Power Delivery Network for Energy-Efficient Microprocessors

Haj-Yahya¹,

Alser²,

Kim³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Modern client processors typically use one of three commonlyused power delivery network (PDN) architectures: 1) motherboard voltage regulators (MBVR), 2) integrated voltage regulators (IVR), and 3) low dropout voltage regulators (LDO). We observe that the energy-e ciency of each of these PDNs varies with the processor power (e.g., thermal design power (TDP) and dynamic power-state) and workload characteristics (e.g., workload type and computational intensity). This leads to energyine ciency and performance loss, as modern client processors operate across a wide spectrum of power consumption and execute a wide variety of workloads.To address this ine ciency, we propose FlexWatts, a hybrid adaptive PDN for modern client processors whose goal is to provide high energy-e ciency across the processor's wide range of power consumption and workloads. FlexWatts provides high energy-e ciency by intelligently and dynamically allocating PDNs to processor domains depending on the processor's power consumption and workload. FlexWatts is based on three key ideas. First, FlexWatts combines IVRs and LDOs in a novel way to share multiple on-chip and o -chip resources and thus reduce cost, as well as board and die area overheads. This hybrid PDN is allocated for processor domains with a wide power consumption range (e.g., CPU cores and graphics engines) and it dynamically switches between two modes: IVR-Mode and LDO-Mode, depending on the power consumption. Second, for all other processor domains (that have a low and narrow power range, e.g., the IO domain), FlexWatts statically allocates o -chip VRs, which have high energy-e ciency for low and narrow power ranges. Third, FlexWatts introduces a novel prediction algorithm that automatically switches the hybrid PDN to the mode (IVR-Mode or LDO-Mode) that is the most bene cial based on processor power consumption and workload characteristics.

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