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Architecturally Homogeneous Power-Performance Heterogeneous Multicore Systems, Koushik Chakraborty, Sanghamitra Roy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), a widely adopted technique to ensure safe thermal characteristics while delivering superior energy efficiency, is rapidly becoming inefficient with technology scaling due to two critical factors: 1) inability to scale the supply voltage due to reliability concerns and 2) dynamic adaptations through DVFS cannot alter underlying power hungry circuit characteristics, designed for the nominal frequency. In this paper, we show that DVFS scaled circuits substantially lag in energy efficiency, by 22%-86%, compared to ground up designs for target frequency levels. We propose architecturally homogeneous power-performance heterogeneous multicore systems, a fundamentally alternate means to design …