Multimedia Systems Power/Energy Reduction Architectural Techniques: a Survey

Power wall is rising as a barrier for the current and the next generations of microprocessor. Many innovative solutions were proposed to deal with partial aspects of this problem. A few solutions deal with the whole power consumption in a holistic view. One solution that impacted the microprocessor industry greatly is the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS). In DVS the microprocessor has multiple voltage/frequency levels that can operate on. Many techniques tried to formulate the power consumption in different ways according to different criteria. Multimedia systems considered as power/energy sensitive systems. Many techniques addressed these systems in particular trying to exploit the special attributes of multimedia applications. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the most popular multimedia system energy consumption reduction techniques.