Saving energy with architectural and frequency adaptations for multimedia applications
Christopher J. Hughes, Jayanth Srinivasan, Sarita V. Adve · 2001
Abstract General-purpose processors are expected to be increas-ingly employed for multimedia workloads on systems where reducing energy consumption is an important goal. Re-searchers have proposed the use of two forms of hardware adaptation- architectural adaptation and dynamic voltage(and frequency) scaling or DVS- to reduce energy. This paper develops and evaluates an integrated algorithm tocontrol both architectural adaptation and DVS targeted to multimedia applications. It also examines the interactionbetween the two forms of adaptation, identifying when each will perform better in isolation and when the addition ofarchitectural adaptation will benefit DVS. Our adaptation control algorithm is effective in savingenergy and exploits most of the available potential. For the applications and systems studied, DVS is consistently bet-ter than architectural adaptation in isolation. The addition of architectural adaptation to DVS benefits some applica-tions, but not all. Finally, in a seemingly counter-intuitive result, we find that while less aggressive architectures re-duce energy for fixed frequency hardware, with DVS, more aggressive architectures are often more energy efficient. 1