Architectural and compiler strategies for dynamic power management in the COPPER project

For a range of embedded system applications in mission critical and energy constrained scenarios, it is important to be able to dynamically control power consumption in response to changing power availability. The authors present their approach to dynamic adaptation of system power consumption and application performance through microarchitectural and software strategies. In particular, they discuss techniques for compiler controlled dynamic register file reconfiguration and profile-driven dynamic clock frequency and voltage scaling. The authors evaluate the effectiveness of power scheduling heuristics based on these techniques in complying with desired power and performance constraints for a given application.