Complete System Power Estimation Using Processor Performance Events

This paper proposes the use of microprocessor performance counters for online measurement of complete system power consumption. The approach takes advantage of the "trickle-down” effect of performance events in microprocessors. While it has been known that CPU power consumption is correlated to processor performance, the use of well-known performance-related events within a microprocessor such as cache misses and DMA transactions to estimate power consumption in memory and disk and other subsystems outside of the microprocessor is new. Using measurement of actual systems running scientific, commercial and productivity workloads, power models for six subsystems (CPU, memory, chipset, I/O, disk, and GPU) on two platforms (server and desktop) are developed and validated. These models are shown to have an average error of less than nine percent per subsystem across the considered workloads. Through the use of these models and existing on-chip performance event counters, it is possible to estimate system power consumption without the need for power sensing hardware.