• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.35 no.12
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• pp.540-551
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• 2008

Today's microprocessor designs are not free from temperature as well as power consumption. As processor technology scales down, an on-chip circuitry increases power density, which incurs excessive temperature (hotspot) problem. To tackle thermal problems cost-effectively, Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) has been suggested: DTM techniques have benefits of thermal reliability and cooling cost. However, they require trade-off between thermal control and performance loss. This paper proposes a dual integer register file structure to minimize the performance degradation due to DTM invocations. In on-chip thermal control, the most important functional unit is an integer register file. It is the hotspot unit because of frequent read and write data accesses. The proposed dual integer register file migrates read data accesses by adding an extra register file, thus reduces per-unit dynamic power dissipation. As a result, the proposed structure completely eliminates localized hotspots in the integer register file, resulting in much less performance degradation by average 13.35% (maximum 18%) improvement compared to the conventional DTM architecture.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.212-216
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• 2010

Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) degrades the processor performance for lowering temperature. For this reason, reducing the peak temperature on microprocessors can improve the performance by reducing the performance loss due to DTM. In this study, we analyze various unit selection techniques for computation migration. According to our simulation results, dynamic computation migration based on the thermal difference between the units shows best performance among compared models.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.532-542
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• 2009

Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) technique is generally used for reducing the peak temperature (hotspot) in the microprocessors. Despite the advantages of lower cooling cost and improved stability, the DTM technique inevitably suffers from performance loss. This paper proposes the DualFloating-Point Adders Architecture to minimize the performance loss due to thermal problem when the floating-point applications are executed. During running floating-point applications, only one of two floating-point adders is used selectively in the proposed architecture, leading to reduced peak temperature in the processor. We also propose a new floorplan technique, which creates Space for Heat Transfer Delay in the processor for solving the thermal problem due to heat transfer between adjacent hot units. As a result, the peak temperature drops by $5.3^{\circ}C$ on the average (maximum $10.8^{\circ}C$ for the processor where the DTM is adopted, consequently giving a solution to the thermal problem. Moreover, the processor performance is improved by 41% on the average by reducing the stall time due to the DTM.