Power management for mobile games on heterogeneous multi-processing system

Abstract

With the explosive growth of the mobile technology industry, mobile games have become a popular application category for mobile users. Mobile games require high computing power to process their high quality scenes. Increased power consumption is a serious problem on mobile platforms with limited battery capacity. Prior work tried to handle this problem by decreasing the frequency of the CPU or GPU to levels at which users cannot recognize performance degradation. However, their solutions encounter a new problem. State-of-the-art commercial mobile devices have adopted asymmetric multi-core systems with a heterogeneous multi-processing (HMP) solution. The HMP solution migrates threads between little cores and big cores according to a thread’s load change. This technology opens a new problem, and prior work cannot handle it properly. In this paper, we characterize the behavior of mobile games on an asymmetric multi-core system with an HMP solution, and then we propose new power management strategies based on our analysis.