NICTA, Sydney, Australia
UNSW, Australia
This paper investigates the validity of common approaches to power management based on dynamic voltage scaling (DVS). Using instrumented hardware and appropriate operating-system support, we account separately for energy consumed by the processor and the memory system.
We find that memory often contributes significantly to overall power consumption, which leads to a much more complex relationship between energy consumption and core voltage and frequency than is frequently assumed. As a consequence, we find that the voltage and frequency setting that minimises energy consumption is dependent on system characteristics, and, more importantly, on the application-specific balance of memory and CPU activity. The optimal setting of core voltage and frequency therefore requires either a-priori analysis of the application or, where this is not feasible, power monitoring at run time.
@inproceedings{Snowdon_RH_05, address = {New Jersey, USA}, author = {David C. Snowdon and Sergio Ruocco and Gernot Heiser}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2005 Workshop on Power Aware Real-time Computing}, month = sep, paperurl = {https://trustworthy.systems/publications/papers/Snowdon_RH_05.pdf}, title = {Power Management and Dynamic Voltage Scaling: Myths and Facts}, year = {2005} }