Runtime Power Monitoring in High-End Processors: Methodology and Empirical Data

This paper describes the technique for a coordinated measurement approach that combines real total power measurement with performance-counter-based, per-unit power estimation. The resulting tool offers live total power measurements for Intel Pentium 4 processors, and also provides power breakdowns for 22 of the major CPU subunits over minutes of SPEC2000 and desktop workload execution. As an example application, they use the generated component power breakdowns to identify program power phase behavior. Overall, this paper demonstrates a processor power measurement and estimation methodology and also gives experiences and empirical application results that can provide a basis for future power-aware research.