Cool Chips Tutorial*
An
Industrial Perspective on Low Power Processor Design
Trevor Mudge, Univ. of Michigan Srilatha Manne, Alpha Dev. Group
Dirk Grunwald, University of Colorado, Boulder
In
recent years, power reduction has become a critical design goal for many
microprocessors due to portability and reliability requirements. Most of the
power savings is achieved through supply voltage reduction and process shrinks.
However, there is a limit to how far the supply voltages may be reduced, and
the power dissipated on chip is increasing even as process technology improves.
Hence, solutions must be found which reduce power at all levels of the design
process.
The
Power-Driven
Microarchitecture Workshop held at ISCA98 in Barcelona, Spain helped raise the awareness of the
architecture community with reference to concerns about power issues. The
workshop brought together members of industry and academia to explore
architectural and compiler modifications for power reduction. It had over 25
papers and 50 registered attendees, and covered topics such as power
estimation, architectural modifications for power, reliability issues, compiler
techniques for power reduction, and voltage scaling.
This
year, the goal remains the same as that of the Power-Driven Microarchitecture
Workshop, although the approach is different. Our goal is to disseminate
knowledge about low power microprocessor design to the architecture community.
To this end, we have assembled a group of speakers from leading microprocessor
companies to give presentations on what they consider to be their critical low
power issues now and in the future, and some possible solutions to these
problems.
The Cool Chips Tutorial will consist of invited speakers who will provide
insight into what power issues constitute a problem for their application
market. The invited speakers will be from the DSP, embedded and general-purpose
processor companies.
The
proceedings contain the speaker’s bios and their presentations. The material
in the proceedings is freely available. However,
please cite the conference (MICRO32), tutorial (Cool
Chips), and the authors/editors when using any material from the proceedings.
MICRO32 Registration
&Accommodation
*Note this tutorial is not related to the COOL Chips
III Symposium that will be held in Japan next spring.
Organizing Committee Chair: Tadao Nakamura
Web site: http://www.coolchips.org
Email address: cool@coolchips.org