Power-Temperature Stability and Safety Analysis for Multiprocessor Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analytical method to predict and ensure thermally safe operation in multiprocessor systems by analyzing power-temperature stability, validated with mobile processor measurements showing high accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a new analytical framework and formula to determine stable power-temperature points and maximum safe power at runtime for multiprocessor SoCs.

Findings

Predicts stable power-temperature points with 2.6% average error

Enables runtime thermal safety assurance

Applicable to modern mobile processors

Abstract

Modern multiprocessor system-on-chips (SoCs) integrate multiple heterogeneous cores to achieve high energy efficiency. The power consumption of each core contributes to an increase in the temperature across the chip floorplan. In turn, higher temperature increases the leakage power exponentially, and leads to a positive feedback with nonlinear dynamics. This paper presents a power-temperature stability and safety analysis technique for multiprocessor systems. This analysis reveals the conditions under which the power-temperature trajectory converges to a stable fixed point. We also present a simple formula to compute the stable fixed point and maximum thermally-safe power consumption at runtime. Hardware measurements on a state-of-the-art mobile processor show that our analytical formulation can predict the stable fixed point with an average error of 2.6%. Hence, our approach can be used at runtime to ensure thermally safe operation and guard against thermal threats.