Evaluating and modeling power consumption of multi-core processors

Recently, energy-efficient computing has become a major interest, both in the mobile and IT sectors. With the advent of multi-core processors and their energy-saving mechanisms, there is a necessity to model their power consumption. The existing models for multi-core processors are based on the assumption that the power consumption of multiple cores performing parallel computations is equal to the sum of the power of each of those active cores. In this paper, we analyze this assumption and show that it leads to lack of accuracy when applied to modern processors such as quad-core. Based on our analysis, we present a methodology for estimating the power consumption of multi-core processors. Unlike existing models, we take into account resource sharing and power saving mechanisms. We show that our approach provides an accuracy within a maximum error of 5%.