Using Asymmetric Single-ISA CMPs to Save Energy on Operating Systems

Jayaram Mudigonda
Nathan L. Binkert
Parthasarathy Ranganathan
Vanish Talwar
IEEE Micro, 28(2008), pp. 26-41

Abstract

CPUs consume too much power. Modern complex cores sometimes waste power on functions that are not useful for the code they run. In particular, operating system kernels do not benefit from many power-consuming features intended to improve application performance. We advocate asymmetric single-ISA multicore systems, in which some cores are optimized to run OS code at greatly improved energy efficiency.

Research Areas