BlitzCoin: Fully Decentralized Hardware Power Management for Accelerator-Rich SoCs

Abstract

On-chip power management techniques have evolved over several processor generations. However, response time and scalability constraints have made it difficult to translate existing power-management strategies to current or next-generation System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures, which are expected to comprise of tens to hundreds of cores and accelerators. In this work we present BlitzCoin, a fully decentralized hardware power-management strategy for large accelerator-rich SoCs, coupled with an optimized unified voltage/frequency actuator. We implement BlitzCoin in a 12nm technology node and deploy it in full SoCs targeted toward different application domains. Our evaluations show markedly faster (8× to 12×) response times, which provides 25%-34% throughput improvement and allows for scaling to 7× to 13× larger SoCs compared to state-of-the-art centralized power-management strategies, while keeping sub-1% area overhead.