Thermal-aware power budgeting for dark silicon chips

This invited paper summarizes two new steps towards dealing with dark silicon issues: Thermal Safe Power (TSP) and MatEx (both available as open-source tools at http://ces.itec.kit.edu/download). TSP is a novel thermal-aware power budgeting technique, which is namely an abstraction that provides safe power constraints as a function of the number of active cores. TSP conceptually and radically changes the typical design that uses a single and constant value as power budget, e.g., the Thermal Design Power (TDP). Executing cores at power values below TSP results in a higher system performance than state-of-the-art solutions, while the chip's temperature remains below the critical levels.