Deterministic power-estimation for thermal control
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsDoron Orenstien, Ronny Ronen
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A system is described that includes a microprocessor and a thermal control subsystem. The microprocessor includes execution resources to support processing of instructions and consumes power. The microprocessor also includes at least one throttling mechanism to reduce the amount of heat generated by the microprocessor. The thermal control subsystem is configured to estimate an amount of power used by the microprocessor and to control the throttling mechanism based on the estimated amount of current power usage to ensure that junction temperature will not exceed the maximum allowed temperature.
Claims19
An apparatus comprising:
- a first counter to count a number of times a first functional unit of the apparatus is activated;
- a processing unit to apply a mathematical function to yield a deterministic estimate of an overall power consumption, the mathematical function to accept inputs including a value from the first counter the mathematical function linear relation to the count.
A method comprising:
- counting a number of times a first functional unit of an integrated circuit is activated and
- applying a mathematical function to generate a deterministic estimate of an overall power utilization of the integrated circuit, the mathematical function accepting as an input the number of times the first functional unit was activated, the mathematical function linear relation to the number of times the first function unit was activated.
A machine-readable medium containing instructions that, when executed by a machine, cause the machine to perform operations comprising:
- counting a number of times a first functional unit of the machine is activated, and
- applying a mathematical function to generate a deterministic estimate of an overall power utilization of the machine, the mathematical function accepting as an input the number of times the first functional unit was activated, the mathematical function linear relation to the number of times the first function unit was activated.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.