Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling based on Buffer Memory Access Information

As processor platforms are continuously moving toward wireless mobile systems, embedded mobile processors are expected to perform more and more powerful, and therefore the development of an efficient power management algorithm for these battery-operated mobile and handheld systems has become a critical challenge. It is well known that a memory system is a main performance limiter in the processor point of view. Although many DVFS studies have been considered for the efficient utilization of limited battery resources, recent works do not explicitly show the interaction between the processor and the memory. In this research, to properly reflect short/long-term memory access patterns of the embedded workloads in wireless mobile processors, we propose a memory buffer utilization as a new index of DVFS level prediction. The simulation results show that our solution provides 5.86% energy saving compared to the existing DVFS policy in case of memory intensive applications, and it provides 3.60% energy saving on average.