On the Power Management of Simultaneous Multithreading Processors

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) processors are widely used in high performance computing tasks. However, with the improved performance of the SMT architecture, the utilization of their functional units is significantly increased, straining the power budget of the processor. This increases not only the dynamic power consumption, but also the leakage power consumption due to the increased temperature. In this paper, a comparison of the static and dynamic sleep signal generation techniques for SMT processors is presented. This is conducted under various workloads to assess their effectiveness in leakage power management. Results show that the dynamic approach exhibits a threefold increase in leakage savings, compared with that of the static approach for certain functional units.