High-speed thermal management for power-dense microprocessors

The computational density of modern processors is so high, that operating all their units at full power would destroy the device by thermal runaway. Hence, temperature control solutions are required that guarantee a safe operation without unduly limiting speed, thus integrating with the power/performance tradeoff management. Moreover, the said solutions have to be simple and computationally light themselves, as millisecond-scale response may be required. Finally, as processors are installed in heterogeneous devices and face a variety of operating conditions, an easy and reliable post-silicon tuning is a must.We present such a solution by exploiting event-based control, and a hardware/software partition aimed at maximising efficiency and flexibility. We show our proposal in action on real hardware, evidencing its advantages over the state of the art.