Abstract:
Now the research of computer architecture focuses on how to utilize the energy of CPU to attain high performance as much as possible. Obviously the architecture-level power estimation tool is important. Existing architecture-level power simulators only focus on full-custom dynamic circuits modeling, but ignores the power modeling of ASIC designs which are mainly composed of static circuits or standard cell libraries. So this paper is concerned with the implementation of a high performance and low power general purpose CPU, the Godson-2 processor, and analyzes the power characteristics of the CPU, and implements an architecture-level power estimation methodology which aims at the Godson-2 processor. This methodology takes the power modeling methodology of CMOS static circuits into account carefully, so it is better for the estimation of current high performance CPU architecture which is designed with ASIC methodology. Compared with the RTL power estimating method, this methodology has high speed and high flexibility and the accuracy is also very good. On the platform of Intel Xeon 2.4GHz, the speed of this methodology is about 300K instructions per second, which is 5000 times that of the RTL power estimating method with only little error penalty.