An Operating Frequency Independent Energy Measurement Technique for High Speed Microprocessors

This paper proposes a more accurate task level energy measurement technique for high speed microprocessors. The technique is based on the relationship of the amount of current consumed by the microprocessor and the pulse width of the power supply controller chip, employed in the synchronous buck DC-DC converter in the microprocessor's power supply. The accuracy of the measurement is accomplished by measuring variation in pulse width in each power supply cycle. The major advantage of this technique is that its accuracy does not depend on the operating frequency of the microprocessor. To prove the proposed technique, we implemented the measurement unit of the microprocessor energy meter using an FPGA chip operating at 50 MHz. Both static and dynamic load measurement are tested in order to obtain some behaviours. Moreover, various commercially available mainboards which employ synchronous buck regulators at 200 KHz switching frequency, were measured. The results agree with previous works with better accuracy at higher operating frequency.