Power and thermal constraints of modern system-on-a-chip computer

Power and thermal are major constraints for delivering compute performance in high-end CPU and are expected to be so in the future. For high end processors, junction temperature has been considered the toughest physical constraint that needs to be tightly managed. Recent trends in form-factors and the increased focus on thin and light systems such as Ultra Book, tablet computers and smartphones, shift the challenge away from junction temperature. Ergonomic thermal considerations and power delivery are becoming the limiters for delivering high computational performance density and need to be managed and controlled. In this paper we describe the major physical constraints, design considerations and modern power and thermal management techniques and demonstrate them on an Intel Core(tm) i7 system.