Reducing Energy Consumption through Adaptive Shutdown Scheduling on a Chip-Multiprocessor

Abstract: There is seemingly a never-ending consumer demand for mobileterminals such as cellular phones and personal digitalassistants (PDAs). Each new generation of terminals comes withmore elaborate functions than in the previous generation. Thistrend results in a higher performance demand on the computerarchitecture that performs the required computations within theterminal. To satisfy the projected requirements on cominggenerations of mobile terminals, we propose an architecturethat when intelligently managed can provide the necessaryperformance at low power and energy consumption. Thisarchitecture, a chip-multiprocessor (CMP), thus amulti-processor implemented on a single chip, has incombination with adaptive scheduling strategies the potentialto efficiently fullfill future requirements. This licentiate thesis spans over several studies done onthe effectiveness of the adaptive CMP. In our studies, we haveshown that an adaptive CMP can satisfy the same performancerequirements as a comparable uni-processor, still consumingless power and energy. Furthermore, we have made an effort toaccurately model the workload behaviour of mobile terminals,which is of paramount importance when comparing candidatearchitectures. In the future, apart from proposing moreadaptive scheduling techniques, we expect to do more thoroughstudies on workload modeling as well as on the operating systeminfluence on the overall performance and power consumption.