Understanding the Thermal Implications of Multi-Core Architectures

Abstract

Abstract-Multicore architectures are becoming the main design paradigm for current and future processors. The main reason is that multicore designs provide an effective way of overcoming instruction-level parallelism (ILP) limitations by exploiting thread-level parallelism (TLP). In addition, it is a power and complexity-effective way of taking advantage of the huge number of transistors that can be integrated on a chip. On the other hand, today's higher than ever power densities have made temperature one of the main limitations of microprocessor evolution. Thermal management in multicore architectures is a fairly new area. Some works have addressed dynamic thermal management in bi/quad-core architectures. This work provides insight and explores different alternatives for thermal management in multicore architectures with 16 cores. Schemes employing both energy reduction and activity migration are explored and improvements for thread migration schemes are proposed.

Predictive Dynamic Thermal and Power Management for Heterogeneous Mobile Platforms

“…Basically, tasks are scheduled to the resources having low utilization and temperature. To enhance thermal control and management further, [8,12] present task migration approach, where the tasks, which have been already scheduled to a particular resource are migrated to other resources in case of thermal violations. Researchers have even tried to implement different policies in conjunction with each other as proposed in [33].…”

Multi-Core CPU Air Cooling

“…CG turns off the clock signals to freeze progress until the thermal emergency is over. When dynamic operations are frozen, processor state including registers, branch predictor tables, and local caches are maintained (Chaparro et al, 2007). So less dynamic power consumed during the wait period.…”

Accurate, Pre-RTL Temperature-Aware Design Using a Parameterized, Geometric Thermal Model

“…In contrast the HotSpot grid model achieves more detailed temperature estimations at the cost of more computational overhead. The importance of having a grid-like thermal model was also discussed in [7].…”

“…We use InCyte R , a novel commercialized early design estimation tool 7 to reconstruct a SoC design based on the published 180nm design data in [27]. This SoC design does not have an integrated heatsink due to its low power consumption.…”