hevcDTM: Application-driven Dynamic Thermal Management for High Efficiency Video Coding

This paper presents an application-driven algorithm for Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) for the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). For efficient design of such a DTM policy, we perform an offline thermal analysis of an HEVC encoder and demonstrate the impact of different video sequences and different coding configurations on the processor temperature. Our thermal analysis is leveraged to develop an efficient application-driven DTM policy that performs temperature-aware coding along with an application-driven control of DTM knobs (e.g., frequency scaling) in order to meet the temperature constraints while still providing high video quality (i.e. PSNR loss < 0.01dB). For accurate thermal analysis and evaluation, we deploy an infrared camera-based thermal measurement setup that, on the contrary to state-of-the-art setups, does not require adding any extra layer on top of the measured chip, thus allowing the camera to accurately capture the infrared emissions from the die.