Temperature-aware computer systems: Opportunities and challenges

Temperature-aware design techniques have an important role to play in addition to traditional techniques like power-aware design and package- and board-level thermal engineering. The authors define the role of architecture techniques and describe hotspot, an accurate yet fast thermal model suitable for computer architecture research.

The Need for Architecture-Level Thermal Management

The architecture domain is unique in its ability to use runtime knowledge of application behavior and the current thermal status of different units of the chip to adjust execution, distribute the workload to control thermal behavior, and exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP). The architecture has detailed temperature information about hot spots and temperature gradients that can combine with dynamic information about ILP to precisely regulate temperature while minimizing performance loss.