Title
Accurate and Stable Run-Time Power Modeling for Mobile and Embedded CPUs.
Abstract
Modern mobile and embedded devices are required to be increasingly energy-efficient while running more sophisticated tasks, causing the CPU design to become more complex and employ more energy-saving techniques. This has created a greater need for fast and accurate power estimation frameworks for both run-time CPU energy management and design-space exploration. We present a statistically rigorous and novel methodology for building accurate run-time power models using performance monitoring counters (PMCs) for mobile and embedded devices, and demonstrate how our models make more efficient use of limited training data and better adapt to unseen scenarios by uniquely considering stability. Our robust model formulation reduces multicollinearity, allows separation of static and dynamic power, and allows a $100{\\times }$ reduction in experiment time while sacrificing only 0.6% accuracy. We present a statistically detailed evaluation of our model, highlighting and addressing the problem of heteroscedasticity in power modeling. We present software implementing our methodology and build power models for ARM Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 CPUs, with 3.8% and 2.8% average error, respectively. We model the behavior of the nonideal CPU voltage regulator under dynamic CPU activity to improve modeling accuracy by up to 5.5% in situations where the voltage cannot be measured. To address the lack of research utilizing PMC data from real mobile devices, we also present our data acquisition method and experimental platform software. We support this paper with online resources including software tools, documentation, raw data and further results.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/TCAD.2016.2562920
IEEE Trans. on CAD of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Central Processing Unit,Data models,Mobile communication,Computational modeling,Performance evaluation,Voltage measurement,Integrated circuit modeling
Data modeling,CPU core voltage,Central processing unit,Computer science,Data acquisition,Electronic engineering,Real-time computing,Dynamic demand,Mobile device,Software,Mobile telephony,Embedded system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
36
1
0278-0070
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.75
18
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matthew J. Walker1655.52
Stephan Diestelhorst2161.82
Andreas Hansson335214.85
Anup Das 0001436733.35
Sheng Yang5746.75
B. M. Al-Hashimi624615.05
geoffrey merrett741149.30