Copyright by William Lloyd Bircher 2010 - The Laboratory for ...
Copyright by William Lloyd Bircher 2010 - The Laboratory for ...
Copyright by William Lloyd Bircher 2010 - The Laboratory for ...
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Despite this, high accuracy of less than 1.7% error is obtained due to the implementation<br />
of DVFS. Unlike CPU DVFS which allows the operating system to reduce voltage and<br />
frequency during active phases, GPU DVFS reduces voltage only when clock gating is<br />
applied (idle). <strong>The</strong>re<strong>for</strong>e, increased power due to operating at the higher voltage is<br />
included in the non-gated clock metric. This bi-modal behavior can be seen in Figure<br />
5.7. <strong>The</strong> mostly-idle, clock-gated portion of the HDR1 workload draws about 1.5W. <strong>The</strong><br />
fully active phase increases voltage and eliminates clock gating. Power increases<br />
drastically to over 4W.<br />
An alternative metric <strong>for</strong> GPU power was also considered: % GUI Active. This metric<br />
represents the portion of time in which the GPU is updated the display. <strong>The</strong> main<br />
limitation of this approach is that it does not account <strong>for</strong> the intensity of work being<br />
per<strong>for</strong>med <strong>by</strong> the underlying GPU hardware. Low-power 2D workloads, such as low-bit<br />
rate video playback, appear to have the same GPU utilization as more intense high-<br />
resolution video decoding. An example of modeled versus measured GPU power <strong>for</strong><br />
3DMark06-HDR1 is provided in Figure 5.7. Modeled GPU power as a function of non-<br />
gated GPU clocks is shown <strong>by</strong> Equation 5.7.<br />
GPU Power =<br />
0.0068 × (Non-Gated Clocks /sec) × 10 -6 + 0.8467<br />
95<br />
(5.7)