Power and performance aware memory-controller voting mechanism

Abstract

Modern System-on-Chips (SoCs) integrate a graphics unit (GPU) with many application processor cores (CPUs), communication cores (modem, WiFi) and device interfaces (USB, HDMI) on a single die. The primary memory system is fast becoming a major performance bottleneck as more and more of these units share this critical resource. An Integrated-Memory-Controller (IMC) is responsible for buffering and servicing memory requests from different CPU cores, GPU and other processing blocks that require DDR memory access. Previous work [2] was focused on appropriately prioritizing memory requests and increasing IMC/DDR memory frequency to improve system performance — which came at the expense of higher power consumption. Recent work has addressed this problem by using a demand based approach. This is accomplished by making the IMC aware of the application characteristics and then scaling its frequency based on the memory access demand [1]. This leads to lower IMC and DDR frequencies and thus lower power. The work presented here shows that instead of lowering the frequency, greater total system power savings can be achieved by increasing IMC frequency at the beginning of a use-case that has moderate GPU utilization. The primary motivation behind this approach is that it allows GPU, with its inherent ability to execute a larger number of parallel threads, to access memory faster and therefore complete its processing portion of the execution pipeline faster. This, in turn, allows relaxation of the timing requirements imposed on the CPU pipeline portion and consecutive cycles, thus saving on total system power. An algorithm for this technique, along with the silicon results on an SoC implemented in an industrial 28nm process, will be presented in this paper.