Fine grained power analysis and low-power techniques of a 128GFLOPS/58W SPARC64 ™ VIIIfx processor for peta-scale computing

An 8-core SPARC64 ™ VIIIfx processor is fabricated in a 45nm CMOS process and achieves a peak performance of 128GFLOPS. Measured results show that the processor consumes only 58W of power when executing a maximum power program. Fine-grained power analysis was used to tune the micro-architecture for low power consumption, and circuit-level low-power techniques were developed. Water cooling and supply voltage adjustment contribute to power reduction at the system level.