A Voting Approach for Adaptive Network-on-Chip Power-Gating

Scalable Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) have become the standard interconnection mechanisms in large-scale multicore architectures. These NoCs consume a large fraction of the on-chip power budget, where the static portion is becoming dominant as technology scales down to sub-10nm node. Therefore, it is essential to reduce static power so as to achieve power- and energy-efficient computing. Power-Gating as an effective static power saving technique can be used to power off inactive routers for static power saving. However, packet deliveries in irregular power-gated networks suffer from detour or waiting time overhead to either route around or wake up power-gated routers. In this article, we propose
Fly-Over (
Flov
)
, a voting approach for dynamic router power-gating in a light-weight and distributed manner, which includes
Flov
router microarchitecture, adaptive power-gating policy, and low-latency dynamic routing algorithms. We evaluate
Flov
using synthetic workloads as well as real workloads from PARSEC 2.1 benchmark suite. Our full-system evaluations show that
Flov
reduces the power consumption of NoC by 31 and 20 percent, respectively, on average across several benchmarks, compared to the baseline and the state-of-the-art while maintaining the similar performance.