Evaluation and modeling of power consumption of a heterogeneous dual-core processor

Embedded systems such as mobile phones widely adopt heterogeneous dual-core processors to improve the performance and reduce the cost and power consumption. Considering mobile devices that are usually battery-operated, one of the critical issues for such an embedded system is software design which must fully utilize the computation power and minimizes the power consumption. A number of power consumption models were proposed to facilitate designers to evaluate and diagnose the power consumption of the software. Unfortunately, previous studies only investigated single-core processors, but have not yet developed power consumption models for heterogeneous dual-core processors. In this paper, a power consumption model for the dual-core processor based on TI OMAP5912 is proposed for evaluating the power consumption of embedded software. This tool not only estimates the energy consumed by embedded software but also analyzes the energy distributions of the software on each processor core. With the aid of this tool, designers could diagnose the power consumption of dual-core embedded software efficiently and easily.