CSE591 Low Power Architecture

29 Jan 07 Presentation I

Instruction Level Power Dissipation in the Intel XScale Embedded Microprocessor

Tools for power analysis of microprocessors at the microarchitectural level:

• SimpleScalar computer architecture simulator

• Wattch: a framework for architectural-level power analysis and optimizations

This software is based on the SimpleScalar software

Download Wattch

• SimplePower "A cycle accurate energy simulator"

12 Feb 07 Project I due

• Pentium D specifications (65nm, up to 5GHz)

-Thermal/Failure Rate relationships, Fig. 4-27

DVFS Project Resources

• Dynamic Voltage Scaling in Mobile Devices

Concise references for DVFS project from 2003 using speedstep on an IBM Thinkpad

Good linux kernel reference

Project II

• XScale project using PXA250 80200 already in Dr. Shrivastava's possession.

19 Feb 07 Presentation II

• Mitigating Amdahl’s Law Through EPI Throttling

-Energy Efficient Co-Adaptive Instruction Fetch and Issue (Throttling paper)

-Instruction Flow-Based Front-end Throttling for Power-Aware High-Performance Processors (Throttling paper)

• Amdahl's Law (Wikipedia)
• Intel article on EPI throttling
• Best of Both Latency and Throughput (introduces EPI Throttling)

Vocabulary

Wall clock time

Project I Take II

Considerations:

• Power use of the LCD vs. the Electrophoretic Display (EPD)
• Existing power reduction schemes for LCDs and thier applicability to EPDs

Dynamic Backlight and Contrast Scaling

• The advantages of bi-stability of EPD over constant refresh of LCD

Possibility of redraw circuitry for bi-stable display which only addressed pixels which need to be updated

• Relavance of the backlight in LCD in comparison with "front-light" in EPD