Analysis of Dynamic Voltage Scaling for System Level Energy Management

In this paper we show that in modern computing systems, DVFS gives much more limited energy savings with relatively high performance overhead as compared to running workloads at high speed and then transitioning into low power state. The primary reasons for this are recent advancements in platform and CPU architectures such as sophisticated memory subsystem design, and more efficient low power state support. We justify our analysis with measurements on a state of the art system using benchmarks ranging from very CPU intensive to memory intensive workloads.