Power-efficiency study using SPECjEnterprise2010

In this paper, we present a case study of the power consumption and performance trade-offs in Java application servers. We use the industry-standard benchmark for the Java application servers, SPECjEnterprise2010, on two platforms with different CPUs, AMD Phenom II and Intel Atom, We investigated the performance and power consumption behaviors against the increasing system size and the relative performance between Phenom vs Atom. Phenom is capable of dynamic frequency scaling (DFS) and we studied the effects of clock frequency control parameters on the performance and power consumption. In terms of the maximum system sizes with valid quality of service (QoS) metrics, Phenom could handle 9.7 times more transactions than Atom. In terms of dynamic power consumption normalized to the system size, Atom was 2.5 times more power-efficient than Phenom. Increasing the sampling rate, one of the DFS parameters, was effective in reducing the power consumption in low load level regions. It reduced the dynamic power up to 7.7 Watt, about 40% lower than the default setting.