Measurements Analysis of the Software-Related Power Consumption in Microprocessors

Abstract

-In this paper the measurements taken for the development of instruction-level energy models for microprocessors are presented and analyzed. An appropriate measuring environment and a suitable measuring methodology was developed for taking the necessary measurements. The energy of an instruction is defined as a sum of three components. The pure base energy cost, the inter-instruction cost and the effect of the energy sensitive factors (instruction parameters). These components are characterized for each instruction of the ARM7TDMI embedded processor and their values are analyzed. Using the resulted models estimates of the energy consumption of real software kernels with only up to 5% error was determined.

An analytical dynamic scaling of supply voltage and body bias exploiting memory stall time variation

“…Processor energy consumption depends on which instructions are executed in the pipeline path [12]. To simply consider the energy dependence on instructions, we distinguish processor operation into two states: processor computation state for executing instructions and memory stall state (equivalent to NOP instructions) mostly for accessing data in memory.…”

Software Related Current/Energy Estimation in Processor Based Implantable Pacemaker

“…There is no direct tool available today to investigate software related energy consumption. Instruction level power modeling for ARM processor/486DX2-S series CPU discussed in [2,3,4], consists of three components such as pure base cost, interinstruction cost and circuit state overheads. In this paper, case study of power crucial biomedical device like implantable pacemaker is discussed, tested using MSP 430F1611 and IAR workbench.…”

“…This method eliminates voltage fluctuation problem present in precision resistor method. High performance current mirror using bipolar transistors for measurement of processor instantaneous current is proposed in [2].…”

A Power Measuring Technique for Built-in Test Purposes

“…A well know publication in the field is [11] where the authors have used a digital multimeter in order to study the energy consumption of three commercial processors, based on an instruction energy model. A more complicated approach is presented in [12] and [13] with the measurements being based on a current mirror that duplicates the current under evaluation so as not to interfere with the operating conditions of the digital system. In [12] instantaneous current waveforms are recorded with the help of a resistor and each clock cycle is characterized separately.…”