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Looking back on the language and hardware revolutions: measured power, performance, and scaling

Published: 05 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports and analyzes measured chip power and performance on five process technology generations executing 61 diverse benchmarks with a rigorous methodology. We measure representative Intel IA32 processors with technologies ranging from 130nm to 32nm while they execute sequential and parallel benchmarks written in native and managed languages. During this period, hardware and software changed substantially: (1) hardware vendors delivered chip multiprocessors instead of uniprocessors, and independently (2) software developers increasingly chose managed languages instead of native languages. This quantitative data reveals the extent of some known and previously unobserved hardware and software trends. Two themes emerge.
(I) Workload: The power, performance, and energy trends of native workloads do not approximate managed workloads. For example, (a) the SPEC CPU2006 native benchmarks on the i7 (45) and i5 (32) draw significantly less power than managed or scalable native benchmarks; and (b) managed runtimes exploit parallelism even when running single-threaded applications. The results recommend architects always include native and managed workloads when designing and evaluating energy efficient hardware.
(II) Architecture: Clock scaling, microarchitecture, simultaneous multithreading, and chip multiprocessors each elicit a huge variety of power, performance, and energy responses. This variety and the difficulty of obtaining power measurements recommends exposing on-chip power meters and when possible structure specific power meters for cores, caches, and other structures. Just as hardware event counters provide a quantitative grounding for performance innovations, power meters are necessary for optimizing energy.

Supplementary Material

ZIP File (powerperf.zip)
The authors have provided experimental data and graphs associated with their article. The files are in .csv and xlsx formats.

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  1. Looking back on the language and hardware revolutions: measured power, performance, and scaling

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ASPLOS XVI: Proceedings of the sixteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
      March 2011
      432 pages
      ISBN:9781450302661
      DOI:10.1145/1950365
      • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
        ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 46, Issue 3
        ASPLOS '11
        March 2011
        407 pages
        ISSN:0362-1340
        EISSN:1558-1160
        DOI:10.1145/1961296
        Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
        ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News  Volume 39, Issue 1
        ASPLOS '11
        March 2011
        407 pages
        ISSN:0163-5964
        DOI:10.1145/1961295
        Issue’s Table of Contents
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      Published: 05 March 2011

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      Author Tags

      1. energy
      2. managed languages
      3. measurement
      4. native languages
      5. performance
      6. power

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      • (2021)Evaluation of Power Consumption of Entry-Level and Mid-Range Multi-Core Mobile ProcessorProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Electronics, Communications and Control Engineering10.1145/3462676.3462682(32-39)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2021
      • (2021)Characterizing Massively Parallel Polymorphism2021 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)10.1109/ISPASS51385.2021.00037(205-216)Online publication date: Mar-2021
      • (2020)Performance Characterization of Simultaneous Multi-Threading and Index Partitioning for an Online Document Search Application2020 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)10.1109/ISPASS48437.2020.00043(231-240)Online publication date: Aug-2020
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