Energy Efficiency Features of the Intel Alder Lake Architecture

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

The continuous evolution of processors requires vendors to translate ever-growing transistor budgets into performance improvements, e.g., by including more functional units, memory controllers, input/output (I/O) interfaces, graphics processing units (GPUs), and caches. This trend also increases complexity, which cannot be fully hidden from the operating system (OS) or application domains. Issues likewhere to place threads if cores have different frequency ranges or architectures, orwhere to perform a task that might be hardware-accelerated cannot be decided on a hardware level. Moreover, performance improvements need to be achieved within a limited power envelope with energy efficiency as a first order design goal. Introduced power saving techniques, however, can contradict OS and applications performance assumptions. Several processor vendors offer heterogeneous processor architectures, such as ARM's big.LITTLE or Apple M1, combining high-performance and power-efficient cores. Intel's first such architecture, Alder Lake, integrates different core architectures and various accelerating components. This work presents an architecture overview of Alder Lake and an in-depth analysis of its power efficiency properties and techniques. For example, this includes frequency scaling of different components, idle states and their latencies, integrated energy measurement capabilities, and recently introduced processor feedback interfaces and OS integration.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICPE '24: Proceedings of the 15th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages95-106
Number of pages106
ISBN (electronic)979-8-4007-0444-4
Publication statusPublished - 7 May 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

Title2024 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering
Abbreviated titleICPE
Conference number15
Duration7 - 11 May 2024
Website
Degree of recognitionInternational event
LocationDepartment of Computing, Imperial College
CityLondon
CountryUnited Kingdom

External IDs

dblp conf/wosp/SchoneVHI24
unpaywall 10.1145/3629526.3645040
ORCID /0000-0002-8491-770X/work/159605027
ORCID /0000-0002-5437-3887/work/159606472
ORCID /0000-0002-2730-0308/work/159607938

Keywords

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Sustainable Development Goals