Power-Temperature Stability and Safety Analysis for Multiprocessor Systems
For designers and runtime managers of multiprocessor SoCs, this provides a computationally efficient method to ensure thermal safety and prevent runaway heating.
This paper presents a power-temperature stability and safety analysis technique for multiprocessor systems, deriving conditions for convergence to a stable fixed point and a formula for maximum thermally-safe power. Hardware measurements show an average prediction error of 2.6%.
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.