Behavior-Aware Integrated CPU-GPU Power Management for Mobile Games

Since game applications have spilled over on the modern mobile platforms equipped with Multiprocessor Systemon-Chips and highlighted the power consumption and battery life problem of these platforms, reducing the game power for mobile devices becomes meaningful. The design of independent CPU-GPU power managements in contemporary platforms results in power consumption waste due to the failure of consideration of CPU-GPU interaction and game workload behaviors. Through analyzing the Application-Operating System (APP-OS) interaction and CPU-GPU interaction, we extract the system-call information and OpenGL API information to characterize the game workload in a low-complexity way. In this paper, based on identifying the game workload behavior and performance bottleneck, we propose a behavior-aware integrated CPU-GPU power management approach for mobile games. We also implement our power saving policy in the real platform, where the evaluation results show that our behavior-aware policy can significantly reduce power and improve game performance. Our policy provides 18% and 5% higher power-efficiency on average compared with the current policy used in our platform and the state-of-the-art policy respectively.