Fine-grain power breakdown of modern out-of-order cores and its implications on Skylake-based systems

摘要

Extreme-scale data centers and supercomputers draw many megawatts of power to function. By today's standards, drawing one megawatt of power roughly costs $1 million; hence, reduced power consumption is critical for these systems. Current and upcoming systems are very efficient in terms of power usage effectiveness (PUE); for example, Intel home-built data centers run at 1.06 PUE and Face-book's centers run at 1.078 PUE. These PUE numbers tell us that most of the power drawn on these systems is used for application execution, and therefore developers need to shoulder the responsibility of achieving power efficiency as well.