Dynamic Power Management Framework for Mobile Multi-core System

In this paper, we propose a dynamic power management framework for multi-core systems. We reduced the power consumption of multi-core processors such as Intel Centrino Duo and ARM11 MPCore, which have been used at the consumer electronics and personal computer market. Each processor uses a different technique to save its power usage, but there is no embedded multi-core processor which has a precise power control mechanism such as dynamic voltage scaling technique. The proposed dynamic power management framework is suitable for smart phones which have an operating system to provide multi-processing capability. Basically, our framework follows an intuitive idea that reducing the power consumption of idle cores is the most effective way to save the overall power consumption of a multi-core processor. We could minimize the energy consumption used by idle cores with application-targeted policies that reflect the characteristics of active workloads. We defined some properties of an application to analyze the performance requirement in real time and automated the management process to verify the result quickly. We tested the proposed framework with popular processors such as Intel Centrino Duo and ARM11 MPCore, and were able to find that our framework dynamically reduced the power consumption of multi-core processors and satisfied the performance requirement of each program.