Fast and accurate power estimation method based on a PMU counter

Most mobile computing devices use a battery as their main power source. Efficient power use and management are very important in mobile devices. It is necessary to understand the power consumption of the processor in a mobile device. In this paper, we choose to use a PMU (Performance Monitoring Unit) to understand hardware performance. By using a PMU counter, it is possible to analyze mobile AP (Application Processor) quickly and accurately without additional CPU overhead. We built a power consumption model using the number of memory accesses per cycle and the clock frequency of the core of mobile AP. By using the power consumption model that we built, we can easily and quickly calculate the power consumption of each core in a multi-core mobile AP. We measured the power consumption of mobile AP using the Mibench benchmark suite and then compared actual measured power consumption and predicted power consumption using several benchmark applications of the Parmibench benchmark suite. The average RMSE between actual measured power consumption and predicted power consumption was 5.01%.