Dynamic thermal management for high-performance microprocessors

With the increasing clock rate and transistor count of today's microprocessors, power dissipation is becoming a critical component of system design complexity. Thermal and power-delivery issues are becoming especially critical for high-performance computing systems. In this work, we investigate dynamic thermal management as a technique to control CPU power dissipation. With the increasing usage of clock gating techniques, the average power dissipation typically seen by common applications is becoming much less than the chip's rated maximum power dissipation. However system designers still must design thermal heat sinks to withstand the worse-case scenario. We define and investigate the major components of any…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• PU
  Princeton University