Thermal Performance Analysis of Mempool RISC-V Multicore SoC

Abstract

The presence of multiple cores in modern multicore architectures makes thermal management and temperature estimation a really challenging task for enhancing reliability and lifespan. Due to the presence of many cores, the core/tile spacing needs to be optimized in order to enhance the thermal coupling between interconnect routing blocks and active tiles. In addition, the tiles activity patterns under partial workload conditions significantly affect the maximum on-chip temperature which results in nonuniform temperature distribution. This is due to poor thermal coupling between neighboring tiles owing to the decrease in spacing between cores. In this article, we investigate the thermal performance analysis of a 256-core (i.e., 64 tiles) Mempool reduced instruction set computer (RISC) V-based architecture considering the impact of inter tiles spacing. Simulation results reveal that lateral heat spreading predominantly affects the thermal performance in multicore architectures under partial workload conditions. We also optimize the thermal performance with different tiles activity pattern. Simulation results reveal that both the maximum on-chip temperature and lateral heat spreading are improved for specific tiles activity patterns. Also the thermal performance analysis considering the "tile-insite effect" reveals that there is little impact on on-chip maximum temperature (T-max ), but the on-chip thermal gradient (Delta T) and the thermal profile pattern are predominantly affected. Finally, the effect of the secondary heat path toward printed circuit board (PCB) is studied in this work.