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Power and Frequency Scaling for the IBM PowerPC 970
A Linux-based power management demonstration for the Maple-D PPC970FX Evaluation System.
Date Posted: September 23, 2005
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What is Power and Frequency Scaling for the IBM PowerPC 970?
Power and Frequency Scaling for the IBM PowerPC 970 is an emerging technology solution that demonstrates a power management implementation for the PPC970FX and CPC925 bridge chips on the Maple-D PPC970FX Evaluation platform running Linux. The PPC970FX CPU chip possesses several discrete frequency steps, such as full frequency (F) and half-frequency (F/2). This package demonstrates how to dynamically scale the system's operating frequency from F to F/2, in order to achieve a cooler, more power-efficient system.
How does it work? The Maple-D PPC970FX Evaluation System contains two PPC970FX processors and one CPC925 Southbridge chip. All three of these units interact through a coordinated series of operating states and must be tuned together and synchronized in frequency in order to operate correctly. The system hardware provides low-level mechanisms for dynamically switching between frequency operating states, and, by lowering the system frequency when high performance is not necessary, significant power and thermal savings can be achieved. This Power and Frequency Scaling package includes the low-level basic routines that demonstrate how to interact with the low-level mechanisms and allow the user to implement basic dynamic system frequency control.
The Power and Frequency Scaling package includes documentation and accompanying program samples. First, primitive examples are included to show how to implement the frequency shift from the PIBS operating environment running on the PPC405EP service processor. Next, these examples are expanded to demonstrate system frequency control from a process running under Linux on the PPC970FX itself.
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| | About the technology author(s):
Mary Seminara and Scott Lekuch are members of the Systems Software Development group managed by Dan Dumarot in IBM Research. They work with product teams to develop new product concepts, and they have backgrounds in low-level system hardware and software design. |
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For platform(s):
Multi-Platform
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For topics:
970, powerPC, power management, linux , cpc925, f/2, MP, frequency, heat, power optimization, scaling
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