Scaling Turbo Boost to a 1000 cores

Abstract

The Intel Core i7 processor code named Nehalem provides a feature named Turbo Boost which opportunistically varies the frequencies of the processor's cores. The frequency of a core is determined by core temperature, the number of active cores, the estimated power consumption, the estimated current consumption, and operating system frequency scaling requests. For a chip multi-processor(CMP) that has a small number of physical cores and a small set of performance states, deciding the Turbo Boost frequency to use on a given core might not be difficult. However, we do not know the complexity of this decision making process in the context of a large number of cores, scaling to the 100s, as predicted by researchers in the field.