Phase-based accurate power modeling for mobile application processors

Abstract

Modern mobile application processors are required to execute heavier workloads while the battery capacity is rarely increased. This trend leads to the need for a power model that can analyze the power consumed by CPU and GPU at run-time, which are the key components of the application processor in terms of power savings. We propose novel CPU and GPU power models based on the phases using performance monitoring counters for smartphones. Our phase-based power models employ combined per-phase power modeling methods to achieve more accurate power consumption estimations, unlike existing power models. The proposed CPU power model shows estimation errors of 2.51% for ARM Cortex A-53 and 1.97% for Samsung M1 on average, and the proposed GPU power model shows an average error of 8.92% for the Mali-T880. In addition, we integrate proposed CPU and GPU models with the latest display power model into a holistic power model. Our holistic power model can estimate the smartphone′s total power consumption with an error of 6.36% on average while running nine 3D game benchmarks, improving the error rate by about 56% compared with the latest prior model.