Correlating Hardware Performance Events to CPU and DRAM Power Consumption
Michael J. Giardino, Bonnie Heck Ferri · 2016
There are numerous ways to control power usage of modern systems. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and C- and P-states are commonly available in hardware, and operating systems have fine-grained control of these states. Unfortunately, most DVFS systems simply consider CPU utilization when determining which P-state to enter. Running average power limit (RAPL), introduced by Intel in their Sandy Bridge line of processors, allows researchers and system designer to obtain detailed estimates of energy consumption by the core, uncore and DRAM. In this paper we use Linux's perf_events subsystem to measure a number of commonly cited performance metrics while running the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks in addition to calculating average power using RAPL registers. This paper shows initial promising results correlating DRAM memory consumption to stall-cycle ratio.