This work presents the design of an on-line energy optimizer unit, which is capable of dynamically adjusting power supply voltages and operating frequencies of multiple processing elements (PE), tailored to the instantaneous workload information and is fully adaptive to variations in process and temperature. The circuit design borrows some of the basic principles of analog computation to continuously optimize the system-wide energy dissipation of multiple cores. The analogy between the energy minimization problem under timing constraints in a general task graph and the power minimization problem under Kirchhoff's current law (KCL) constraints in an equivalent resistive network is exploited. To our best knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to demonstrate an on-line solution to complex, multi-variable energy optimization problem which allows dynamic adjustment of individual operating frequencies and supply voltages of multiple processing elements.
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