Energy Management for Microprocessor Systems: Challenges and Existing Solutions

Energy is a critical resource to not only mobile, wireless, and battery-powered devices, but also consumer PCs and large scale server system and data centers. High energy consumption results in more heat dissipations, cooling costs and makes servers become more prone to failures. In this paper a survey is presented on the problem and the different proposed solutions of energy management for microprocessor systems are discussed, which can be divided into two main tracks, system-wide energy management and per-component energy management. This paper also presents a discussion on the future research topics and the challenges of the energy management problem in microprocessor systems.