Frequency–voltage cooperative CPU power control: A design rule and its application by feedback prediction

Frequency–voltage cooperative power control (FVC) is a powerful method to reduce the CPU power consumption of a program during execution, because it utilizes the information on the software workload dynamically. In this paper, we first show through a mathematical analysis the design rule to determine the necessary frequencies and its effect. Then we show experimental results of implementing an FVC with a feedback algorithm on MPEG-4 video and MP3 audio decoders with two sets of frequency and voltage. The FVC gave a 72p reduction in CPU power consumption during execution. In addition, we show a “Cool-Start” method that begins the FVC at a lower frequency and improves the power reduction effect. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 36(6): 39–48, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (). DOI 10.1002sscj.20263

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