Trustworthy Systems

Mobile multicores: Use them or waste them

Authors

Aaron Carroll and Gernot Heiser

NICTA

UNSW

A revised version of this paper was published in Operating Systems Review, Volume 48, Issue 1, January 2014, pages 44-48.

Abstract

Energy management is a primary consideration in the design of modern smartphones, made more interesting by the recent proliferation of multi-core processors in this space. We investigate how core offlining and DVFS can be used together on these systems to reduce energy consumption. We show that core offlining leads to very modest savings in the best circumstances, with a heavy penalty in others, and show the cause of this to be low per-core idle power. We develop a policy in Linux that exploits this fact, and show that is improves up to 25% on existing implementations.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Carroll_Heiser_13_2,
    address          = {Farmington, PA, USA},
    author           = {Carroll, Aaron and Heiser, Gernot},
    booktitle        = {Workshop on Power Aware Computing and Systems},
    month            = nov,
    pages            = {5},
    paperurl         = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_full_text/7302.pdf},
    slides           = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/nicta_slides/7302.pdf},
    title            = {Mobile Multicores: Use Them or Waste Them},
    year             = {2013}
  }

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