Investigation of Micro-Parameters Towards Green Computing in Multi-Core Systems

Energy is one of the critical factors for power constrained devices. Various hardware- and software-based approaches have been devised to save energy consumption and move towards green computing. Dynamic frequency and voltage (DVFS) is one of the well-known firmware-based energy saving policies popular in the processor industry. Among these approaches, little work towards the energy saving at the micro-level has been achieved. Therefore, there is a dire need to save the energy at the micro-level (at the ISA and system parameters level). Considering this aspect, in this paper we have performed an in-depth analysis of instruction set architecture (ISA) effects on the energy consumption for the multi-core systems. The analysis carried out here would be helpful for the designers to accelerate the green computing by exploiting the outcomes of the simulations. The simulations have been carried out under the state-of-the-art gem5 simulator for the Mi-bench benchmark applications. The results indicate that to promote green computing, novel ARM architectures are suitable for the handheld computing devices, whereas X-86 architectures should be used for the higher end devices such as desktop and servers. Additionally, processor core type (in-order and out-of-order) also plays a major role for the energy consumption, thus, needs to be selected carefully for the distinct application types.