System level adaptive framework for power and performance scaling on Intel® PXA27x processor

Next generation phone and PDAs face stringent power and performance requirements. In order to take advantage of dynamic voltage and frequency management, software driven adaptive power management methods are emerging as the key to performance and power scaling. This paper demonstrates an adaptive power management framework for Intel XScale™ microarchitecture based platforms, which dynamically characterizes executing workloads based on system level events and adapts frequency and voltage in order to save power. In this paper we discuss the overall framework and analysis behind the optimal policy to adapt processor frequency and voltage. The paper also illustrated benefits of using this framework for MP3 playback, memory data transfer, phone idling etc. real life case studies.