Quality of service-aware dynamic voltage and frequency scaling for embedded GPUs

Abstract

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is a key technique for reducing processor power consumption in mobile devices. In recent years, mobile system-on-chips (SoCs) has supported DVFS for embedded graphics processing units (GPUs) as the processing power of embedded GPUs has been increasing steadlily. The major challenge of applying DVFS to a processing unit is to meet the quality of service (QoS) requirement while achieving a reasonable power reduction. In the case of GPUs, the QoS requirement can be specified as the frame-per-second (FPS) which the target GPU should achieve. The proposed DVFS technique ensures a consistent GPU performance by scaling the operating clock frequency in a way that it maintains a uniform FPS.