AMD SOC power management: Improving performance/watt using run-time feedback

This paper presents an analysis of four runtime power management features implemented in AMD´s recent 28nM APU. These features optimize SOC performance by shifting power and frequency resources in response to workload characteristics. The Global Efficient APM (GEAPM), Core-Bound Boost (CBB) and Memory-Bound Boost (MBB) features are shown to provide a performance improvement of up to 76%, 4.3% and 12.5% respectively. The Local Efficient APM (LEAPM) feature is shown to reduce average CPU power consumption by 34% while reducing performance by less than 1%.