A novel GPU power model for accurate smartphone power breakdown

Abstract

As GPU power consumption in smartphones increases with more advanced graphic performance, it becomes essential to estimate GPU power consumption accurately. The conventional GPU power model assumes, simply, that a GPU consumes constant power when turned on; however, this is no longer true for recent smartphone GPUs. In this paper, we propose an accurate GPU power model for smartphones, considering newly adopted dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. For the proposed GPU power model, our evaluation results show that the error rate for system power estimation is as low as 2.9%, on average, and 4.6% in the worst case.