Abstract:

With continued advances in CMOS technology, parameter variations are emerging as a major design challenge. Irregularities during the fabrication of a microprocessor and variations of voltage and temperature during its operation widen worst-case timing margins of the design - degrading performance significantly. Because runtime variations like supply voltage droops and temperature fluctuations depend on the activity signature of the processor's workload, there are several opportunities to improve performance by dynamically adapting margins. This paper explores the power-performance efficiency gains that result from designing for typical conditions while dynamically tuning frequency and voltage to accommodate the runtime behavior of workloads. Such a design depends on a fail-safe mechanism that allows it to protect against margin violations during adaptation; we evaluate several such mechanisms, and we propose a local recovery scheme that exploits spatial variation among the units of the processor. While a processor designed for worst-case conditions might only be capable of a frequency that is 75% of an ideal processor with no parameter variations, we show that a fine-grained global frequency tuning mechanism improves power-performance efficiency (BIPS ³ /W) by 40% while operating at 91% of an ideal processor's frequency. Moreover, a per-unit voltage tuning mechanism aims to reduce the effect of within-die spatial variations to provide a 55% increase in power-performance efficiency. The benefits reported are clearly substantial in light of the <1% area overhead relative to existing global recovery mechanisms.