Thermal-Effective Clustered Microarchitectures

As frequencies and feature size scale faster than operating voltages, power density is increasing in every processor generation. Along with that, leakage (highly dependent on temperature) has become an important source of power. Due to the non uniformity of on-chip power density, localized hot spots may create transient high temperature in a restricted area of the chip. These temperatures are source of errors and reduce chip reliability. This paper evaluates clustered architectures as an effective way to distribute power across the chip in order to reduce chip temperature. The proposed quadcluster architecture reduces 33% peak temperature and 12% average. Along with this, “cluster-hopping” decreases temperature in the chip because of disabling some of the clustered backends during a period of time: peak temperatures are reduced 37% and average temperature of the processor 14% with an extra penalty of 3%.