Thermally adaptive quality-of-service

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-10095286-B2
Application number	US-201414503321-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Sep 30, 2014
Priority date	May 30, 2014
Publication date	Oct 9, 2018
Grant date	Oct 9, 2018

Abstract

A method and apparatus of a device that manages a thermal profile of a device by selectively throttling central processing unit operations of the device is described. The device manages a thermal profile of the device by adjusting a throttling a central processing unit execution of a historically high energy consuming task. In this embodiment, the device monitors thermal level of the thermal profile of the device, the device is executing a plurality of tasks that utilize a plurality of processing cores of the device. If the thermal level of the device exceeds a thermal threshold, the device identifies one of the plurality of tasks as a historically high energy consuming task, and throttles this historically high energy consuming task by setting a force idle execution time for the historically high energy consuming task. The device further executes the plurality of tasks.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A non-transitory machine-readable medium having executable instructions to cause one or more processing units to perform a method to manage a thermal profile of a device, the method comprising:
monitoring thermal level of the thermal profile of the device, wherein the device is executing a plurality of tasks that utilize a plurality of processing cores of the device;
if the thermal level of the device exceeds a thermal threshold,
identifying one of the plurality of tasks as a historically high energy consuming task, wherein the identifying is based on at least information about historical energy consumption from a database that tracks energy consumption from previously running tasks, and
throttling the historically high energy consuming task by setting a force idle execution time for the historically high energy consuming task, wherein the force idle time is a percentage greater than zero and less than a hundred, wherein the force idle time percentage is set by the system according to the threshold exceeded; and

executing the plurality of tasks.

2. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 1 , wherein a selective forced idle is an amount of time during an execution window that a task is not being executed.

3. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 2 , further comprising:
putting a first processing core in a low power state during the selective forced idle.

4. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 2 , further comprising:
overlapping the selective forced idle execution time with another one of the plurality of task that has a corresponding selective forced idle execution time.

5. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 1 , wherein a historically high energy consuming task is a task that consumes more energy than an average of the plurality of tasks.

6. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 1 , further comprising:
capturing energy consumption data for the plurality of tasks.

7. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 6 , wherein the energy consumption data for one of the plurality of tasks is the amount of energy that is used by the device to execute that task.

8. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 1 , wherein the executing the tasks comprises executing the plurality of tasks on a plurality of processing cores of the device.

9. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 1 , wherein the thermal level is selected from the group consisting of device temperature and audible fan noise.

10. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 1 , wherein the monitoring of the thermal level comprises:
recording the device temperature.

11. The non-transitory machine-readable medium of claim 1 , wherein the historically high energy consuming task is a foreground task.

12. A method to manage a thermal profile of a device, the method comprising:
monitoring thermal level of the thermal profile of the device, wherein the device is executing a plurality of tasks that utilize a plurality of processing cores of the device;
if the thermal level of the device exceeds a thermal threshold,
identifying one of the plurality of tasks as a historically high energy consuming task, wherein the identifying is based on at least information about historical energy consumption from a database that tracks energy consumption from previously running tasks, and
throttling the historically high energy consuming task by setting a force idle execution time for the historically high energy consuming task, wherein the force idle time is a percentage greater than zero and less than a hundred, wherein the force idle time percentage is set by the system according to the threshold exceeded; and

executing the plurality of tasks.

13. The method of claim 12 , wherein a selective forced idle is an amount of time during an execution window that a task is not being executed.

14. The method of claim 13 , further comprising:
overlapping the selective forced idle execution time with another one of the plurality of task that has a corresponding selective forced idle execution time.

15. The method of claim 13 , wherein a historically high energy consuming task is a task that consumes more energy than an average of the plurality of tasks.

Assignees

• Apple Inc

Inventors

• Kumar Derek R

Classifications

• G06F1/3287

  by switching off individual functional units in the computer system · CPC title

• G06F1/3206

  Monitoring of events, devices or parameters that trigger a change in power modality · CPC title

• Y02D10/126

  Cross-Sectional Technologies · mapped topic

• G06F1/329

  by task scheduling · CPC title

• Y02D10/16

  Cross-Sectional Technologies · mapped topic