User experience-based mechanism for preserving energy in graphics-intensive applications

Continuous advancements in integrated circuit design and technologies, and the constant development of a diverse set of attractive applications paved the way for versatile mobile computing devices that we rely on for most of our daily activities. The dependency of these appliances on battery as the main power source imposed strict constraints on the energy consumption of applications running on such devices. In this paper, we present a dynamic mechanism that tunes the system parameters to minimize the energy consumption of the mobile system, while keeping the performance up to an adequate level. We focus on user experience metrics such as frames per second (FPS) to set boundaries beyond which we throttle the frequency of the processor cores or the graphics engine to diminish the energy consumption. We tested our scheme on the Intel Sandy Bridge platform, and our experimental results demonstrated that considerable energy (around 20% on the tested applications) could be saved, mapping to valuable savings in battery life and a decrease in peak power.