Don't burn your mobile!
Andrea Tilli, Andrea Giorgio Bartolini, Matteo Cacciari, Luca Benini · 2012
Computational sprinting has been recently proposed as an effective solution to mitigate the upcoming dark silicon utilization wall problems. As most applications do not require constantly the maximum performance level and parallelism, computational sprinting uses the intrinsic thermal capacitance of the heat dissipation system, possibly augmented with Phase Change Materials, as heat buffer for tolerating bursts of intensive computational resource usage largely exceeding the steady-state thermal design power. It is clear that sprinting poses peculiar challenges on the dynamic thermal control policy. In this paper we introduce and evaluate an innovative and low-overhead hierarchical model-predictive controller that enables thermally-safe sprinting while guaranteeing a predictable re-sprinting rate.