Effects of workload variation on the energy distribution in a mobile platform

Continuous advancements in integrated circuit design and the constant development of a diverse set of computing applications, paved the way for versatile mobile devices that we use on daily basis. The dependency of these devices on battery as the main power source imposed strict constraints on the energy consumption of applications that run on these mobile devices. In this paper, we present a component-wise energy consumption breakdown of a modern platform under a variety of workloads and benchmarks. This study provides useful insights into the energy consumption profile of various hardware components, and the manner in which the operating system uses them. It is a crucial step in pointing future research towards the power-hungry components and providing a better understanding of the system’s behavior, featuring a baseline to analyze the tradeoffs that system designers can use to optimize the upcoming platforms given the physical considerations and the practical constraints. Our results demonstrate a substantial variation in the energy contribution of various components as well as the total system energy depending on the nature of the workload. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.