Power optimization for multimedia transcoding on multicore servers

We design, implement and evaluate a power-efficient and traffic-aware transcoding system on multicore servers that appropriately adjusts the processor operating level. The system is capable of configuring the number of active cores and core frequency “on-the-fly” according to the varying traffic rate. Results on an AMD machine show that our system saves 51.0% power consumption compared to a native system without power-saving schemes. It also outperforms three other power-aware systems, CG (clock gating), C-DVFS (chip-wide DVFS) and Hybrid (chip-wide DVFS + power-gating), by 19.5%, 10.5% and 5.5% reduction of power consumption, respectively.