Dynamic Thermal Management for MPEG-2 Decoding

In this paper, we propose an effective dynamic thermal management (DTM) scheme for MPEG-2 decoding by allowing some degree of spatiotemporal quality degradation. Given a target MPEG-2 decoding time, we dynamically select either an intra-frame spatial degradation or an inter-frame temporal degradation strategy in order to make sure that the microprocessor chip continues to stay in a thermally safe state of operation, albeit with certain amount of image/video quality loss. For our experiments, we use the MPEG-2 decoder program of MediaBench and modify/combine Wattch and HotSpot for the power and thermal simulations and measurements, respectively. Our experimental results show that we achieve thermally safe state with spatial quality degradation of 0.12 root mean square error (RMSE) and with frame drop rate of 12.5% on average