Power is ubiquitous to the success of any product. Be it heat dissipated, insulation weight or battery-life, all weigh in the success or failure of a product. In this post, we will discuss on how power consumption influences the success of the product.
Role of power
Understanding the rate of power generated in various user-modes provides great insight into where the product will fit in the market. During product specification, we rely more on vendor data sheets, Excel files and prior experience than on power.
How to improve?
Power is a functionality of the customer use case and the interaction between devices. If the tasks are shifted relative to each other by a few milliseconds, it will reduce the number of multiple concurrent requests. If the request from different parts of the system to memory is sequenced, it would reduce random access to memory banks. Both these changes will improve power saving by 30-50%, cause the peak power to drop, and the insulation will be reduced, leading to lower cost and size.
Today’s handheld devices are measured by their display and battery life. Power management system design will impact the availability of a brighter display and better system response to user commands.
To study the rate of power consumption:
- The solution should possess the ability to input the workload, use cases, power-levels for different architecture component and behaviour of each component in the use-case.
- A mechanism is required to enable analysis, communication and sharing to study the rate of power consumption before finalizing the specification.
- A visual environment would be preferable as this will be used by technologist, marketing and managers.
We used VisualSim Architect for a customer engagement recently. DDR4 prices have been slashed but the product is almost ready to be shipped. The question was whether the reduced power from DDR4 would more than compensate for the slip in the product schedule. A model was quickly constructed in VisualSim based on estimated provided by the vendor and internal tests. The Architects team was able to quickly run experiments using a discrete-event simulator to look at the different customer scenarios. The models was embedded in the internal Wiki and shared with all the groups concerned. Everyone could visualize and conduct experiment, just by changing values in a Web Browser. Thus a joint decision could be quickly made.
Early system exploration and analysis of system enables better power management and increases the success rate of any product. As mentioned above, power is a function of the customer use-case and the interaction between components. It is vital to study the interaction to truly impact the power consumption and maintain the product’s performance. The systematic approach will always lead to other innovation the management of power.