On the influence of static power consumption in multicore embedded systems

Energy consumption in multicore embedded systems has become a constant concern. Thread-Level Parallelism exploitation may reduce energy consumption because it saves static power consumption of the processor, since performance is obtained. However, as will be shown in this paper, the influence of the static power on the energy consumption and Energy-Delay Product will depend on how significant it is in the processor. By evaluating different levels of static power in the respect to the total power consumption in two embedded processors (ARM and Atom), we demonstrate that if the right value of static power consumption is tuned during the designing and manufacturing, it is possible to save up 35% in energy consumption and achieve up to 20% of improvements in the EDP efficiency (i.e., the best possible use of the available resources). We also show that the more communication the parallel application has, the lower is the impact of static power of the processor in the total energy consumption.