M-DTM: migration-based dynamic thermal management for heterogeneous mobile multi-core processors

Recently, mobile devices have employed heterogeneous multi-core processors which consist of high-performance big cores and low-power small cores. In heterogeneous mobile multi-core processors, the conventional DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling) -based DTM (Dynamic Thermal Management) is still adopted; it does not actively utilize the small cores to resolve thermal problem. In this paper, we propose M-DTM (Migration-based DTM) for heterogeneous mobile multi-core processors. In case of thermal emergency of the big cores, M-DTM migrates applications to the small cores instead of lowering the voltage and frequency of the big cores. In this way, M-DTM allows more time for the applications to run at the highest frequency of the big cores by cooling down the big cores more rapidly, compared to the conventional DTM. Through real measurement, we show that M-DTM improves performance by 10.6% and saves system-wide energy (not CPU energy) by 3.6%, on average, compared to the conventional DTM.