Evaluation of power consumption at execution of multiple automatically parallelized and power controlled media applications on the RP2 low-power multicore

This paper evaluates an automatic power reduction scheme of OSCAR automatic parallelizing compiler having power reduction control capability when multiple media applications parallelized by the OSCAR compiler are executed simultaneously on RP2, a 8-core multicore processor developed by Renesas Electronics, Hitachi, and Waseda University. OSCAR compiler enables the hierarchical multigrain parallel processing and power reduction control using DVFS (Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling), clock gating and power gating for each processor core using the OSCAR multi-platform API. The RP2 has eight SH4A processor cores, each of which has power control mechanisms such as DVFS, clock gating and power gating. First, multiple applications with relatively light computational load are executed simultaneously on the RP2. The average power consumption of power controlled eight AAC encoder programs, each of which was executed on one processor, was reduced by 47%, (to 1.01W), against one AAC encoder execution on one processor (from 1.89W) without power control. Second, when multiple intermediate computational load applications are executed, the power consumptions of an AAC encoder executed on four processors with the power reduction control was reduced by 57% (to 0.84W) against an AAC encoder execution on one processor (from 1.95W). Power consumptions of one MPEG2 decoder on four processors with power reduction control was reduced by 49% (to 1.01W) against one MPEG2 decoder execution on one processor (from 1.99W). Finally, when a combination of a high computational load application program and an intermediate computational load application program are executed simultaneously, the consumed power reduced by 21% by using twice number of cores for each application. This paper confirmed parallel processing and power reduction by OSCAR compiler are efficient for multiple application executions. In execution of multiple light computational load applications, power consumption increases only 12% for one application. Parallel processing being applied to intermediate computational load applications, power consumption of executing one application on one processor core (1.49W) is almost same power consumption of two applications on eight processor cores (1.46W).