A systematic method for functional unit power estimation in microprocessors

We present a new method for mathematically estimating the active unit power of functional units in modern microprocessors such as the Pentium 4 family. Our method leverages the phasic behavior in power consumption of programs, and captures as many power phases as possible to form a linear system of equations such that the functional unit power can be solved. Our experiment results on a real Pentium 4 processor show that power estimations attained as such agree with the measured power very well, with deviations less than 5% only

[1]  J. MacQueen Some methods for classification and analysis of multivariate observations , 1967 .

[2]  Margaret Martonosi,et al.  Run-time power estimation in high performance microprocessors , 2001, ISLPED '01.

[3]  Kevin Skadron,et al.  Temperature-aware microarchitecture , 2003, ISCA '03.

[4]  Brad Calder,et al.  Automatically characterizing large scale program behavior , 2002, ASPLOS X.

[5]  Wei Wu,et al.  Efficient thermal simulation for run-time temperature tracking and management , 2005, 2005 International Conference on Computer Design.

[6]  Margaret Martonosi,et al.  Runtime Power Monitoring in High-End Processors: Methodology and Empirical Data , 2003, MICRO.

[7]  Margaret Martonosi,et al.  Runtime power monitoring in high-end processors: methodology and empirical data , 2003, Proceedings. 36th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2003. MICRO-36..

[8]  Wei Wu,et al.  Fast thermal simulation for architecture level dynamic thermal management , 2005, ICCAD-2005. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, 2005..

[9]  Brinkley Sprunt,et al.  Pentium 4 Performance-Monitoring Features , 2002, IEEE Micro.

[10]  Kevin Skadron,et al.  Using performance counters for runtime temperature sensing in high-performance processors , 2005, 19th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.