Evaluation of Low-Power Computing when Operating on Subsets of Multicore Processors

Given the accelerated growth in tablet devices, smartphones, and netbooks, designers are faced with serious challenges to meet the needs of mobility in terms of battery life and form factor. It is vital to investigate how to deliver the best mobile experience to users while ensuring adequate levels of performance. In this paper, we present a power management evaluation of multi-core processor systems by comparing thermal power, battery life, and performance when running different types of workloads under a limited number of cores. To show the potential gains from a system power management perspective, we have assessed a mobile platform featuring the Second Generation Intel Core i5 processor, and tested it on a wide selection of workloads and benchmarks. Experimental results show significant thermal power reduction (up to 40 %) in a variety of scenarios, while system performance was sustained in most cases but sacrificed in a few other uncommon situations.