Thermal Management with Asymmetric Dual Core Designs

Thermal considerations play an increasingly important role in the design of new processors. Thermal concerns impact how chips are laid out, how quickly processors can be clocked, processor reliability, and how expensive the packaging is. Current production chips are often packaged to dissipate maximum typical power, rather than maximum absolute power. We investigate techniques which would allow the use of an even lower thermal threshold, thus further reducing packaging costs. We examine single core and dual core solutions to deal with thermal overloads. Our single core solutions include techniques already deployed by chip manufacturers and others proposed by researchers. We also present symmetric and asymmetric dual core techniques. We find that our dual core techniques compare favorably to single core techniques in their ability to reduce thermal loads. Our asymmetric dual core techniques provide additional advantages over single core techniques, by providing an additional low power core that can be used to improve overall system throughput.