The design of power delivery system plays a crucial role in guaranteeing the proper functionality of many-core processor systems. The power loss suffered on power delivery has become a salient part of total power consumption, and the energy efficiency of a highly dynamic system has been significantly challenged. Being able to achieve a fast response time and multiple voltage domain control, on-chip voltage regulators(VRs) have become popular choices to enable fine-grain power management, which also enlarge the design space of power delivery systems. This paper analytically studies different power delivery system paradigms and power management schemes in terms of energy efficiency, area overhead and power pin occupation. The analysis shows that compared to the conventional paradigm with offchip voltage regulators, hybrid paradigms with both on-chip and off-chip voltage regulators are able to maintain high efficiency in a larger range of workloads, though they suffer from low efficiency at light workload. Employed with the quantized power management scheme, the hybrid paradigm can improve the system energy efficiency at light workload by a maximum of 136% compared to the traditional load balanced scheme. Besides this, the in-package hybrid paradigm further shows its advantage in reducing the physical overheads. The results reveal that at 120W workload, it occupies only a 10.94% total footprint area or 39.07% power pins of that of the off-chip paradigm. We conclude that the in-package hybrid paradigm achieves the best trade-offs between efficiency, physical overhead and realization of fine-grain power management.Index Terms-power delivery system, voltage regulator, energy efficiency, power management, package pins
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.