Green GPU Design

Modern smartphones are limited by their short battery life. The advancement of the graphical performance is considered as one of the main reasons behind the massive battery drainage in smartphones. In this project we worked on a novel implementation of the GPUFreq Scaling Governors, a Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) model implemented in the Android Linux kernel for dynamically scaling smartphone Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). The GPUFreq governors offer users multiple variations and alternatives in controlling the power consumption and performance of their GPUs. We implemented and evaluated our model on a smartphone GPU and measured the energy performance using an external power monitor. The results show that the energy consumption of smartphone GPUs can be significantly reduced with a minor effect on the GPU performance

Duration

2013-2015

Funding

KAUST Baseline Funding

Team Members

• Enas Ahmad

Selected Publications

• E. Ahmad and B. Shihada, "Green Smartphone GPUs: Optimizing Energy Consumption using GPUFreq Scaling Governors", in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob), pp. 740-747, 2015. [PDF]

Software Packages

• GPULogger v1.3, 2014. Android Application for reading smart phone GPU clock rates