Power Multiplexing for Thermal Field Management in Many-Core Processors

This paper presents the effect of proactive spatiotemporal power multiplexing on the thermal field in many-core processors. Power multiplexing migrates the locations of active cores within a chip after each fixed time interval, referred to as the migration interval, to redistribute the generated heat and thereby reduce the peak temperature and spatial and temporal nonuniformity in the thermal field. Clock and supply gating is used to minimize the power of the deactivated cores. The control of the migration interval is studied considering a 256-core processor at the predictive 16-nm node to evaluate the conflicting impact of the migration interval on thermal field and system performance.