Hyung Beom Jang, Jinhang Choi, Ikroh Yoon, Sung-Soo Lim, Seungwon Shin, Naehyuck Chang, and Sung Woo Chung, "Exploiting Application/system-dependent Ambient Temperature for Accurate Microarchitectural Simulation", IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 705-715, April 2013.
Abstract
In the early design stage of processors, Dynamic Thermal Management
(DTM) schemes should be evaluated to avoid excessively high temperature,
while minimizing performance overhead. In this paper, we show that
conventional thermal simulations using the fixed ambient temperature may
lead to the wrong conclusions in terms of temperature, performance,
reliability, and leakage power. Though ambient temperature converges to a
steady-state value after hundreds of seconds when we run SPEC CPU2000
benchmark suite, the steady-state ambient temperature is significantly
different depending on applications and system configuration. To
overcome inaccuracy of conventional thermal simulations, we propose that
microarchitectural thermal simulations should exploit
application/system-dependent ambient temperature. Our evaluation results
reveal that performance, thermal behavior, reliability, and leakage
power of the same DTM scheme are different when we use the
application/system-dependent ambient temperature instead of the fixed
ambient temperature. For accurate simulation results, future
microarchitectural thermal researchers are expected to evaluate their
proposed DTM schemes based on application/system-dependent ambient
temperature.