Adaptive speed control of a general-purpose processor based on activities

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method for dynamically controlling the clock speed of a processor in order to reduce power consumption without decreasing system performance. It automatically tunes the processor's speed by monitoring its activities and avoiding useless work so as not to exhaust the battery energy. Experiments with performance bottlenecks caused by disk activities show that the proposed method is very effective in comparison with the traditional one, in which the processor's speed is fixed.