TRINITY: Coordinated Performance, Energy and Temperature Management in 3D Processor-Memory Stacks
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The consistent demand for better performance has lead to innovations at hardware and microarchitectural levels. 3D stacking of memory and logic dies delivers an order of magnitude improvement in available memory bandwidth. The price paid however is, tight thermal constraints. In this paper, we study the complex multiphysics interactions between performance, energy and temperature. Using a cache coherent multicore processor cycle level simulator coupled with power and thermal estimation tools, we investigate the interactions between (a) thermal behaviors (b) compute and memory microarchitecture and (c) application workloads. The key insights from this exploration reveal the need to manage performance, energy and temperature in a coordinated fashion. Furthermore, we identify the concept of "effective heat capacity" i.e. the heat generated beyond which no further gains in performance is observed with increases in voltage-frequency of the compute logic. Subsequently, a real-time, numerical optimization based, application agnostic controller (TRINITY) is developed which intelligently manages the three parameters of interest. We observe up to 30% improvement in Energy Delay^2 Product and up to 8 Kelvin lower core temperatures as compared to fixed frequencies. Compared to the ondemand Linux CPU DVFS governor, for similar energy efficiency, TRINITY keeps the cores cooler by 6 Kelvin which increases the lifetime reliability by up to 59%.
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