Power Management for Real-Time Embedded Systems on Block-Partitioned Multicore Platforms

Power management has become a very important research area and various approaches have been proposed. As an energy-efficient architecture, chip multiprocessor (CMP) has been widely adopted by chip manufacturers. In this paper, we study power management schemes for real-time systems on block-partitioned multicore platforms, where the processing cores are grouped into different blocks and cores on one block share the same power supply voltage (thus have the same frequency). We evaluate the energy efficiency of different block configurations. Simulation results show that block-partitioned CMP has its inherent advantages to fulfill the goal of power efficiency and low design complexity for future CMPs.