Architecture level thermal modeling for multi-core systems using subspace system method

This paper proposes a new architecture-level thermal modeling method to address the emerging thermal related analysis and optimization problem for high-performance multi-core microprocessor design. The new approach, called Thermsid, builds the thermal behavioral models from the measured or simulated thermal and power information at the architecture level. Thermsid builds the thermal models by first generating a Hankel matrix of Markov parameters, from which state matrices are obtained through minimum square optimization. Compared to existing behavioral thermal modeling algorithms, the proposed method is much more general as it does not require step temperature responses, leading to greater flexibility during the modeling process. Experimental results on a real quad-core microprocessor show that Thermsid provides accurate thermal behavioral models comparable existing approaches.