Morph: Adding an Energy Gear to a High Performance Microarchitecture for Embedded Applications

This paper discusses early results from a project called Morph where the goal is to develop a microarchitecture that can adapt its intrinsic performance dynamically. By observing that power dissipation is, to a first approximation, proportional to a power of the performance, reducing the performance characteristics thus reduces the power even faster, resulting in greatly improved performance/ watt characteristics. These techniques are largely independent of other techniques, such as voltage scaling, and as such add an extra runtime “gear” which a real embedded system may manipulate. In addition to the microarchitecture work, the paper also briefly discusses the driving application to be used in its evaluation, namely planetary rovers, and a discussion of some of the runtime software considerations that will be necessary to work through to make the “gear-changing” a usable piece of technology to real applications.