IEICE Transactions on Electronics
Online ISSN : 1745-1353
Print ISSN : 0916-8524
Special Section on Low-Power and High-Speed Chips
An Operating System Guided Fine-Grained Power Gating Control Based on Runtime Characteristics of Applications
Atsushi KOSHIBAMikiko SATOKimiyoshi USAMIHideharu AMANORyuichi SAKAMOTOMasaaki KONDOHiroshi NAKAMURAMitaro NAMIKI
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2016 Volume E99.C Issue 8 Pages 926-935

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Abstract

Fine-grained power gating (FGPG) is a power-saving technique by switching off circuit blocks while the blocks are idle. Although FGPG can reduce power consumption without compromising computational performance, switching the power supply on and off causes energy overhead. To prevent power increase caused by the energy overhead, in our prior research we proposed an FGPG control method of the operating system(OS) based on pre-analyzing applications' power usage. However, modern computing systems have a wide variety of use cases and run many types of application; this makes it difficult to analyze the behavior of all these applications in advance. This paper therefore proposes a new FGPG control method without profiling application programs in advance. In the new proposed method, the OS monitors a circuit's idle interval periodically while application programs are running. The OS enables FGPG only if the interval time is long enough to reduce the power consumption. The experimental results in this paper show that the proposed method reduces power consumption by 9.8% on average and up to 17.2% at 25°C. The results also show that the proposed method achieves almost the same power-saving efficiency as the previous profile-based method.

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© 2016 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
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