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Frequency vs. power consumptionFrequency vs. power consumptionPosted Mar 27, 2012 14:06 UTC (Tue) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)In reply to: Frequency vs. power consumption by chrisr Parent article: The Linaro Connect scheduler minisummit
Well, remember, madvise() is a hint. I think you and I likely agree that the system should run reasonably if nobody ever calls it in a typical application. It exists to help you take performance from "reasonable, if not quite optimal" to "stellar." So, if you're bzip2 you might consider throwing that flag. As you said, though, it's less clear if you're a web browser or office app. (Although, I strongly suspect both are more cache thrashy than they'd like to be, even when idle.) That said, my madvise() proposal above was partly tongue in cheek. (It was also partly inspired by MADV_RANDOM.) It would be interesting though, to try to characterize apps by their recent cache miss ratios and use that to make CPU affinity selections as well as operating frequency selections. Actually, you need two ratios: Hit/(hit+miss) and Stall/(stall+non-stall) cycles. You could have a fairly high miss ratio with a low stall ratio. A faster CPU still helps you. The high miss ratio suggests streaming or a large working set, but there's enough prefetching and/or inherent parallelism the CPU can stay busy. A high miss ratio with a high stall ratio suggests a more serial program that's staying memory bound. Lower frequency or a slower CPU is unlikely to hurt the performance of the program. Anyway... I've devolved into ramble-ville.
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