Guide: Sandhya L

Assistant Professor
Dept. Of ECE SCTCE

Presented by:
Sourav Sasidharan (1240211
Sreeram R (12402112)
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ABSTRACT
This seminar emphasizes on increasing the
utilization of rarely used silicon, called Dark Silicon,
for an energy efficient architecture in android.
GreenDroid attains this by filling the dark silicon
with specialised cores.

CONTENTS
Utilization wall and Dark
silicon
C-core
Greendroid and its
Architecture
C-core Energy efficiency
Conclusion

MOORES LAW
The number of transistors in a chip doubles every new technological
node

The Scaling Promise Of

Moores Law
8 Years Ago

Today transistors are

Today

3.8 Ghz

4x Faster

15.2
Ghz
3.6 Ghz

1 Core

16x more
plentiful

6 Cores
16
cores

90nm

22nm
64x

3.6 Ghz

6 Cores
5.7x

UTILIZATION WALL
With each successive generation, the percentage of a chip that
can actively switch drops exponentially due to power
constraints
A direct consequence of this is Dark Silicon
limits the utilization of the application processors

tilization Wall: Dark Implications for Multico

Spectrum of tradeoffs
between # cores and
frequency.

2x4 cores @ 3 GHz

(8 cores dark)
(Industrys Choice)

e.g.; take

65 nm32 nm

4 cores @ 3 GHz

4 cores @ 2x3 GHz

(12 cores dark)
65 nm

32 nm

WHAT DO WE DO WITH DARK SILICON??

Goal: Leverage Dark silicon for more efficient architecture
Approach:
1. Fill dark silicon with specialised cores called c-cores to
save energy on common apps.
2. Execution- jump from c-core to c-core
3. Provide focused re-configurability to evolving workloads

CONSERVATION CORES
Hot code
Specialized cores for
reducing energy
Hotcode run by c-cores,and cold
code runs on host cpu
C-cores uses upto 18x less
energy
Shared D-cache

Fully automated toolchain

C-cores automatically generated
from hot program regions
HW generation/SW integration

D cache

Host
CPU

C-Core

I cache

(general purpose)

Cold code

ANDROID
Googles OS+app.
Environment for mobile
devices
Java applications run on the
Dalvik virtual machine
Apps share a set of libraries
(libc,OpenGL,SQLite,etc)

APPLICATIONS

LIBRARIES

DALVIK
CACHE

LINUX KERNEL
HARDWARE

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Applying C-cores to
Android
Android well suited for ccores
Core set of commonly
used applications
Libraries are hot code
Dalvik virtual machine is
hot code
Libraries,Dalvik,kernel
and application hotspots
c-cores

APPLICATIONS

LIBRARIES

DALVIK
CACHE

LINUX KERNEL
HARDWARE

C-CORES

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WHAT IS GREENDROID?
A mobile application processor
45-nm multicore research prototype
Targets the Android mobile-phone software stack.
Can execute general-purpose mobile programs with 11 times
less energy
Saves energy by using specialised cores called conservation
cores(c-cores)
C-cores span approximately 95 percent of the execution time

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The GreenDroid Architecture

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The GreenDroid Architecture

Tiled lattice of 16 cores
Each tile contains
o 6-10 Android c-cores
o 32KB D-Cache
o MIPS processor
32bits,7stage
pipeline
16KB I-cache
Single-precision
FPU
o On-chip network

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GreenDroid Tile Floor plan

50% C-cores
25% D-cache
25% MIPS core,
I-cache and on-chip
network

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C-CORE ENERGY EFFICIENCY

c-cores dont requires overheads.
specialization of the c-cores data path.
energy drops from 91 pJ per instruction to just 8
pJ per instruction.

D-Cache; 6%
6; 6% 3; 3%

I-Cache; 23%

Datapath; 38%

Fetch/Decode; 19%

Energy Saved; 91; 91%

Register; 14%

C-cores 8pJ/instr

Baseline CPU 91pJ/instr 17

CONCLUSION
Over the next 5 to 10 years, the amount of dark
silicon will increase exponentially.
c-cores technique converts dark silicon into
energy savings.
Reduce processor energy consumption by 91
percent for hot code.

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Reference

Michael B. Taylor
A LANDSCAPE OF THE NEW DARK SILICON DESIGN
REGIME
Published by IEEE computer society
Steven Swanson Michael Bedford Taylor
THE GREENDROID MOBILE APPLICATION
PROCESSOR:AN
ARCHITECTURE FOR SILICONS
DARK FUTURE
Published by IEEE computer society
http://greendroid.ucsd.edu/

THANK
YOU
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