Nvidia Corporation

Aniket Naik

John H Edmondson

Tezaswi Raja

Sachin Satish Idgunji

Rajeshwaran Selvanesan

Peter Michael Nelson

Narayan Kulshrestha

Arvind Gopalakrishnan

Divya Ramakrishnan

Amit Pabalkar

Benjamin Faulkner

Kevin Wilder

Peter Sommers

Siddharth Bhargav

Raj Jayakar

Fei (Walter) Li

Bardia Zandian

Justin Tai

Daniel Rodriguez

Systems and techniques for improving the performance of circuits while adapting to dynamic voltage drops caused by the execution of noisy instructions (e.g. high power consuming instructions) are provided. The performance is improved by slowing down the frequency of operation selectively for types of noisy instructions. An example technique controls a clock by detecting an instruction of a predetermined noisy type that is predicted to have a predefined noise characteristic (e.g. a high level of noise generated on the voltage rails of a circuit due to greater amount of current drawn by the instruction), and, responsive to the detecting, deceasing a frequency of the clock. The detecting occurs before execution of the instruction. The changing of the frequency in accordance with instruction type enables the circuits to be operated at high frequencies even if some of the workloads include instructions for which the frequency of operation is slowed down.

Techniques for configuring a processor to execute instructions efficiently

Integrated circuits, or computer chips, typically include multiple hardware components (e.g. memory, processors, etc.) operating under a shared power (e.g. thermal) constraint that is sourced by one or more power sources for the chip. Typically, the hardware components can be individually configured to operate at certain states (e.g. to operate at a certain frequency by setting a clock speed for a clock dedicated to the hardware component). Thus, each hardware component can be configured to operate at an operating point that is determined to be optimal, usually in terms of achieving some desired goal for a specific application (e.g. frame rates for gaming, etc.). In the context of chip hardware that operates under a shared power/thermal constraint, a method, computer readable medium, and system are provided for determining the optimal operating point for the chip that takes into consideration both performance of the chip and power consumption by the chip.

Optimal operating point estimator for hardware operating under a shared power/thermal constraint

An issue control unit is configured to control the rate at which an instruction issue unit issues instructions to an execution pipeline in order to avoid spikes in power drawn by that execution pipeline. The issue control unit maintains a history buffer that reflects, for N previous cycles, the number of instructions issued during each of those N cycles. If the total number of instructions issued during the N previous cycles exceeds a threshold value, then the issue control unit throttles the instruction issue unit from issuing instructions during a subsequent cycle. In addition, the issue control unit increases the threshold value in proportion to the number of previously issued instructions and based on a variety of configurable parameters. Accordingly, the issue control unit maintains granular control over the rate with which the instruction issue unit 'ramps up' to a maximum instruction issue rate.

Technique for reducing voltage droop by throttling instruction issue rate

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Aniket Naik