Measuring performance, power, and temperature from real processors

Abstract

The modeling of power and thermal behavior of processors requires challenging validation processes, which may be complex and undependable. In order to ameliorate some of the difficulties associated with the validation of power and thermal models, this paper describes an infrared measurement setup that simultaneously captures run-time power consumption, thermal characteristics, and performance activity counters from modern processors. We use infrared cameras with high spatial resolution (10x10µm) and high frame rate (125Hz) to capture thermal maps. Power measurements are obtained with a multimeter, while performance counters are obtained after modifying the operating system (Linux), both at a sampling rate of 1KHz. The synchronized traces can then be used in the validation process of possible thermal, power, and processor activity models.

Device Scaling Considerations for Nanophotonic CMOS Global Interconnects

“…Tuning of nanophotonic devices is essential due to the intrinsic temperature dependence of refractive index of solid state materials, wafer level variability, with run time operating temperature variability [39]. The total power including the tuning power for modulator and detector wavelength selective devices can be written as…”

“…As shown in figure 4, 100 fJ/bit energy targets can be reached only at 40 Gb/s when a 2 nm (20 C) correction is required. The run time temperature control for the micro-processors is expected to be 20 C with a spatial variation of 50 C in temperature [39]. Hence significant advances, in temperature independent device operation [40] or highly efficient low overhead tuning schemes remain to be developed [41,42].…”

Improved post-silicon power modeling using AC lock-in techniques

“…The most flexible, versatile approach for post-silicon power modeling is to capture the thermal emissions from the back side of the die during operation using sensitive infrared imaging equipment and then translate these emissions into spatial and temporal power estimates [7,12,15,4]. One of the major challenges in such approach is that spatial heat diffusion, which arises naturally from heat conduction in solids, blurs the underlying power maps which could introduce errors during thermal to power inversion [7,4,1].…”

“…Because of the challenges in pre-silicon power models, it is necessary to conduct post-silicon power mapping to validate design choices and analyses [7,12,15,4]. Figure 1.a illustrates the main framework of post-silicon power mapping.…”

Broadband hitless silicon electro-optic switch for optical networkson-chip

“…A broadband switch is important for two main reasons: low distortion of high bandwidth signals [3] and robustness from on-chip temperature changes [4]. To develop such a switch we need both a broadband filter and the ability to switch data within the filter band.…”