Temperature-aware runtime power management for chip-multiprocessors with 3-D stacked cache

The advent of 3-D fabrication technology makes it possible to stack a large amount of last-level cache memory onto a multi-core die to reduce off-chip memory accesses and, thus, increases system performance. However, the higher power density (i.e., power dissipation per unit volume) of 3-D integrated circuits (ICs) might incur temperature-related problems in reliability, leakage power, system performance, and cooling cost. In this paper, we propose a runtime solution to maximize the performance (i.e., instruction throughput) of chip-multiprocessors with 3-D stacked last-level cache memory, without thermal-constraint violation. The proposed method combines runtime cache tuning (e.g., cache-way partitioning, cache-way power-gating, cache data placement) with per-core dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS) in a temperature-aware manner. Experimental results show that the integrated method offers 23% performance improvement on average in terms of instructions per second (IPS) compared with temperature-aware runtime cache tuning only.