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Section: New Software and Platforms

ATMI

Modeling microprocessor temperature.

Scientific Description

Research on temperature-aware computer architecture requires a chip temperature model. General purpose models based on classical numerical methods like finite differences or finite elements are not appropriate for such research, because they are generally too slow for modeling the time-varying thermal behavior of a processing chip.

We have developed an ad hoc temperature model, ATMI (Analytical model of Temperature in MIcroprocessors), for studying thermal behaviors over a time scale ranging from microseconds to several minutes. ATMI is based on an explicit solution to the heat equation and on the principle of superposition. ATMI can model any power density map that can be described as a superposition of rectangle sources, which is appropriate for modeling the microarchitectural units of a microprocessor.