Scaling Turbo Boost to a 1000 cores

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges and complexity of implementing Turbo Boost technology in processors with up to 1000 cores, extending the understanding of dynamic frequency scaling in large-scale multi-core systems.

Contribution

It analyzes the decision-making process for Turbo Boost in large-scale multi-core processors, highlighting the increased complexity with many cores.

Findings

Complexity of Turbo Boost decision increases with core count

Scaling Turbo Boost to 1000 cores presents significant challenges

Insights into frequency management in large multi-core processors

Abstract

The Intel Core i7 processor code named Nehalem provides a feature named Turbo Boost which opportunistically varies the frequencies of the processor's cores. The frequency of a core is determined by core temperature, the number of active cores, the estimated power consumption, the estimated current consumption, and operating system frequency scaling requests. For a chip multi-processor(CMP) that has a small number of physical cores and a small set of performance states, deciding the Turbo Boost frequency to use on a given core might not be difficult. However, we do not know the complexity of this decision making process in the context of a large number of cores, scaling to the 100s, as predicted by researchers in the field.