Hybrid architectural dynamic thermal management

When an application or external environmental conditions cause a chip's cooling capacity to be exceeded, dynamic thermal management (DTM) dynamically reduces the power density on the chip to maintain safe operating temperatures. The challenge is that even though this reduction in power density reduces heat dissipation and can be used to regulate temperature and reduce the need for expensive thermal packages, reducing power density may come at a cost in execution speed. This paper shows the importance of processor-architecture techniques for DTM, and proposes a new, "hybrid," low-overhead implementation based on combining fetch gating and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS). When thermal stress is low, fetch gating is superior because it exploits instruction-level parallelism (ILP). Once thermal stress becomes severe enough that fetch gating degrades ILP, DVS is engaged instead to take advantage of its greater ability to reduce power density. We show that under a variety of assumptions about DVS implementation, a hybrid policy reduces DTM performance overhead by 25% on average compared to DVS, and is easy to design.