Impact of battery capacity and memory bandwidth on CPU speed-setting: A case study

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to report the power and performance of an application on a real system as the CPU frequency varies. Previous work in CPU speed-setting considered only the power of the CPU and only CPU's that vary supply voltage with frequency. This work takes a broader approach, considering total system power, battery capacity and main memory bandwidth. The results, which are up to a factor of four less than ideal, show that all three must be considered when setting the CPU speed, whether the speed is fixed at a single value or varied dynamically during operation.