Measuring performance, power, and temperature from real processors

The modeling of power and thermal behavior of processors requires challenging validation processes, which may be com-plex and undependable. In order to ameliorate some of the dif-ficulties associated with the validation of power and thermal models, this paper describes an infrared measurement setup that simultaneously captures run-time power consumption, thermal characteristics, and performance activity counters from modern processors. We use infrared cameras with high spatial resolution (10x10µm) and high frame rate (125Hz) to capture thermal maps. Power measurements are obtained with a multimeter, performance counters are obtained after modi-fying the operating system (Linux), both at a sampling rate of 1KHz. The synchronized traces can then be used in the validation process of possible thermal, power, and processor activity models.