Energy Introspector: Simulation Infrastructure for Power, Temperature, and Reliability Modeling in Manycore Processors

This paper presents an architectureindependent modeling infrastructure called the Energy Introspector for estimating non-functional aspects of processors such as energy, power, temperature, area, delay, sensor, and reliability. The Energy Introspector supports processor modeling through the integration of various modeling tools. It features structural abstraction of physical and microarchitectural components, standard library format for compatible integration of modeling tools, and synchronization of multiple phenomena models (e.g., time, power, temperature). With the Energy Introspector interface, this paper suggests an analytical processor power estimation method using the instruction-based energy profiling. The analytical power estimation is approximately 4.13 times faster than the cycle-level microarchitecture simulation approach with 2.5% of average error rate. The speed of prediction is especially important in manycore processor modeling, where the simulation time increases drastically as the number of cores increases.