Adaptive guardband scheduling to improve system-level efficiency of the POWER7+
Yazhou Zu, Charles R. Lefurgy, Jingwen Leng, Matthew Halpern, Michael S. Floyd, Vijay Janapa Reddi · 2015
The traditional guardbanding approach to ensure processor reliability is becoming obsolete because it always over-provisions voltage and wastes a lot of energy. As a next-generation alternative, adaptive guardbanding dynamically adjusts chip clock frequency and voltage based on timing margin measured at runtime. With adaptive guardbanding, voltage guardband is only provided when needed, thereby promising significant energy efficiency improvement.