On energy efficiency and amdahl's law in FPGA based chip heterogeneous multiprocessor systems (abstract only)

This poster presents our preliminary findings on the relationship between speedup and energy efficiency on FPGA based Chip Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Systems (CHMPs). While researchers have investigated how to tailor combinations of heterogeneous compute engines within a CHMP system to best meet the performance needs of specific applications, exploring how these optimized architectures also effect energy efficiency is not as well studied. We show that a simple relationship exists between the speedup these systems gain and their associated energy efficiency. We show that the simple relationship between Amdahl's law and energy efficiency. All the experiments result achieved through actual run time measurements on homogeneous and heterogeneous multiprocessor systems implemented within a Xilinx Virtex6 FPGA. We further show how a systems with 6 MicroBlaze soft processors' dynamic power and hence the overall energy efficiency of the system can be effected through transparent operating system control of the compute resources. We also present how to use clock gating to control the dynamic power consumption for each processor and with this careful power-aware management unit, the system's dynamic power consumption can follow the requirements of each application.