Toshiba has developed a low power operating system (OS) for
many-core processors, targeting application in embedded systems,
including automotive products and digital consumer products.
The Japanese company claims that an evaluation of the OS on the
company's own many-core processor recorded a 24.6% power reduction
against the standard OS when running a super resolution program
that scaled 1920?1080 pixel images to 3840?2160 resolutions.
Many-core processors, with up to dozens of cores, are finding an
important role in running multimedia processing applications.
However, there is a problem: the higher the number of cores, the
higher total power consumption.
In current methodology, the OS controls power to the processor
based on computation load history. However, this approach is not
accurate enough to reduce power consumption and fails to manage
abrupt fluctuations in computation load, and so more power than
necessary is consumed.
Toshiba's many-core processor OS achieves low power consumption by
using information inherent to parallel programs to control power
supply. Parallel programs are run by a thread unit, and to run
correctly the order for executing the threads must be specified.
Toshiba has developed and employed a technique for specifying the
"number of dependence" among threads and controlling the execution
order. This approach recognizes that the dependency number at any
given time closely foreshadows the computation load in the near
future, securing a more accurate prediction of power requirements.
The new OS controls power supply and achieves a low power system
without degradation in performance.
Toshiba plans to apply the low power OS to embedded systems for
such applications as high resolution image processing and image
recognition.