PEPON: Performance-aware hierarchical power budgeting for NoC based multicores

Targeting NoC based multicores, we propose a two-level power budget distribution mechanism, called PEPON, where the first level distributes the overall power budget of the multicore system among various types of on-chip resources like the cores, caches, and NoC, and the second level determines the allocation of power to individual instances of each type of resource. Both these distributions are oriented towards maximizing workload performance without exceeding the specified power budget. Extensive experimental evaluations of the proposed power distribution scheme using a full system simulation and detailed power models emphasize the importance of power budget partitioning at both levels. Specifically, our results show that the proposed scheme can provide up to 29% performance improvement as compared to no power budgeting, and performs 13% better than a competing scheme, under the same chip-wide power cap.