Abstract
Gaming on mobile platforms is highly power hungry and rapidly drains the limited-capacity battery. In multi-threaded gaming, each thread has different processing requirements and even a single slow thread may lead to Quality of Service (QoS) violations. Further, modern mobile platforms are equipped with asymmetric multi-core processors, so that different cores exhibit diverse power and performance properties. These asymmetric cores along with different Dynamic Power Management (DPM) techniques enable a high degree of power efficiency in mobile gaming. The default Linux power manager (i.e. “Governor”) of asymmetric multi-cores performs power-wise inefficient for mobile games as it over allocates resources for processing threads by being oblivious to the QoS. The state-of-the-art Governor for mobile gaming does not account for multi-threaded gaming workloads, which are mainstream in mobile gaming. In this work, we present a power-performance characterization of multi-threaded mobile games by executing them on a real-world mobile platform with an asymmetric multi-core. This analysis is leveraged to propose a QoS-aware Governor running a lightweight online heuristic that holistically accounts for thread-to-core mapping and DPM. This solution, when integrated into the platform’s Operating System (OS), provides 12% improved power efficiency on average.
Anuj Pathania
Assistant Professor
Anuj Pathania is an Assistant Professor in the Parallel Computing Systems (PCS) group at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His research focuses on the design of sustainable systems deployed in power-, thermal-, energy- and reliability-constrained environments.