Nearly 60% of the world population uses a mobile phone, which is typically powered by a system-on-chip (SoC). While the mobile platform capabilities range widely, responsiveness, long battery life and reliability are common design concerns that are crucial to remain competitive. Consequently, state-of-the-art mobile platforms have become highly heterogeneous by combining a powerful SoC with numerous other resources, including display, memory, power management IC, battery and wireless modems. Furthermore, the SoC itself is a heterogeneous resource that integrates many processing elements, such as CPU cores, GPU, video, image, and audio processors. Therefore, CPU cores do not dominate the platform power consumption under many application scenarios.

Competitive performance requires higher operating frequency, and leads to larger power consumption. In turn, power consumption increases the junction and skin temperatures, which have adverse effects on the device reliability and user experience. As a result, allocating the power budget among the major platform resources and temperature control have become fundamental consideration for mobile platforms. Dynamic thermal and power management algorithms address this problem by putting a subset of the processing elements or shared resources to sleep states, or throttling their frequencies. However, an adhoc approach could easily cripple the performance, if it slows down the performance-critical processing element. Furthermore, mobile platforms run a wide range of applications with time varying workload characteristics, unlike early generations, which supported only limited functionality. As a result, there is a need for adaptive power and performance management approaches that consider the platform as a whole, rather than focusing on a subset. Towards this need, our specific contributions include (a) a framework to dynamically select the Pareto-optimal frequency and active cores for the heterogeneous CPUs, such as ARM big.Little architecture, (b) a dynamic power budgeting approach for allocating optimal power consumption to the CPU and GPU using performance sensitivity models for each PE, (c) an adaptive GPU frame time sensitivity prediction model to aid power management algorithms, and (d) an online learning algorithm that constructs adaptive run-time models for non-stationary workloads.

Mobile platforms are becoming highly heterogeneous by combining a powerful multiprocessor system-on-chip (MpSoC) with numerous resources including display, memory, power management IC (PMIC), battery and wireless modems into a compact package. Furthermore, the MpSoC itself is a heterogeneous resource that integrates many processing elements such as CPU cores, GPU, video, image, and audio processors. As a result, optimization approaches targeting mobile computing needs to consider the platform at various levels of granularity.

Platform energy consumption and responsiveness are two major considerations for mobile systems since they determine the battery life and user satisfaction, respectively. In this work, the models for power consumption, response time, and energy consumption of heterogeneous mobile platforms are presented. Then, these models are used to optimize the energy consumption of baseline platforms under power, response time, and temperature constraints with and without introducing new resources. It is shown, the optimal design choices depend on dynamic power management algorithm, and adding new resources is more energy efficient than scaling existing resources alone. The framework is verified through actual experiments on Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 based tablet MDP/T. Furthermore, usage of the framework at both design and runtime optimization is also presented.