Resource Area Dilation to Reduce Power Density in Throughput Servers

Throughput servers using simultaneous multithreaded (SMT) processors are becoming an important paradigm with products such as Sun's Niagara and IBM Power5. Unfortunately, throughput-computing via SMT aggravates power-density problems because SMT increases utilization, decreasing cooling opportunities for overheated resources. Existing power density techniques are: slowing computation and lowering supply voltage, which is likely infeasible in future technologies; stopping computation to reduce heating, which substantially degrades performance; or migrating computation to spare resources, which adds complexity; or requiring underutilized resources, which may not be available in an SMT-based throughput server. An alternative is to increase the area of heat-prone resources at design time. We propose the concept of dilation where a resource’s circuit components are spread over an area larger than required for correct logic. Increasing area allows the resource to be utilized more without violating power-density constraints. This paper is the first to consider increasing CPU resource area for improving throughput in a thermally-constrained processor. Dilating area to improve performance seems counterintuitive because it also increases the latency of the components. However this technique is uniquely effective in SMT-based throughput computing because having multiple threads from which to choose instructions makes SMTs more tolerant of added latency than superscalars. We propose two implementations. Our first implementation, Simple Resource Area Dilation (S-RAD), increases the area of heat-prone resources and scales the CPU clock frequency accordingly. Ou