Keynote Presentation:

Core Duo Power and Thermal-Aware Architecture

Efraim Rotem, Intel^®

Abstract

• Computer Power and thermal limitations in the recent years are becoming the biggest technology limiting factor in the development of high performance CPU in all segments of computer systems.  In the server domain, the cost of electricity drives the need for energy efficient systems, and in the mobile market there is a strong demand for better battery life and addressing thermal limitations.  The increasing demand for computational power in conjunction with the relatively slow improvement in the cooling technology made the power and thermal control methods a fundamental consideration in the development of the new Intel^® Core™ Duo system.  Intel^® Core™ Duo is the first general purpose, multi-core on die (CMP) processor, developed for the mobile market.  It was designed to deliver uncompromised performance, within power and thermal limitation while providing long battery life of the mobile system.  The Intel^® Core™ Duo was architected and designed to provide power and energy efficient execution.  Only performance features that proved to be ahead of the dynamic voltage scaling curve where eventually implemented. In addition, much emphasis was given to power and thermal management features.  These allow internal self control mechanism and interfaces to external software and platform management algorithms.  As a result, the Intel^® Core™ Duo had introduced significant performance improvement over previous Intel^® mobile processor products, together with improvement of power and energy efficiency and extended battery life.

Biography

• Efi Rotem is a senior computer architect at Intel^®'s mobile platform group in Haifa, Israel.  In the recent years he has been responsible for the power and thermal architecture of the Intel^® Centrino® and the Intel^® Core™ Duo.  Efi joined Intel in 1995 and prior to his current position, he was involved in the definition, development and testing of the Intel^® Pentium^® with MMX™ technology, and various Pentium^® 4 processors.  Prior to joining Intel, he was the founder and CTO of a company, developing data security systems.  He received his B.Sc degree from the Technion, Israeli Institute of Technology in 1986.