Experimental Characterization of Variation in Power Consumption for Processors of Different Generations

Data centers are energy-hungry facilities. Building energy consumption predictive models for servers is one of the solutions to use efficiently the resources. However, physical experiments have shown that even under the same conditions, identical processors consume different amount of energy to complete the same task. While this manufacturing variability has been observed and studied before, there is lack of evidence supporting the hypotheses due to limited sampling data, especially from the thermal characteristics. In this article, we compare the power consumption among identical processors for two Intel processors series with the same TDP (Thermal Design Power) but from different generations. The observed power variation of the processors in newer generation is much greater than the older one. Then, we propose our hypotheses for the underlying causes and validate them under precisely controlled environmental conditions. The experimental results show that, with the increase of transistor densities, difference of thermal characteristics becomes larger among processors, which has non-negligible contribution to the variation of power consumption for modern processors. This observation reminds us of re-calibrating the precision of the current energy predictive models. The manufacturing variability has to be considered when building energy predictive models for homogeneous clusters.