Latency-critical applications running in modern datacenters exhibit irregular request arrival patterns and are implemented using multiple services with strict latency requirements (30–250μs). These characteristics render existing energy-saving idle CPU sleep states ineffective due to the performance overhead caused by the state’s transition latency. Besides the state transition latency, another important contributor to the performance overhead of sleep states is the cold-start latency, or in other words, the time required to warm up the microarchitectural state (e.g., cache contents, branch predictor metadata) that is flushed or discarded when transitioning to a lower-power state. Both the transition latency and cold-start latency can be particularly detrimental to the performance of latency critical applications with short execution times. While prior work focuses on mitigating the effects of transition and cold-start latency by optimizing request scheduling, in this work we propose a redesign of the core C-state architecture for latency-critical applications. In particular, we introduce C6Awarm, a new Agile core C-state that drastically reduces the performance overhead caused by idle sleep state transition latency and cold-start latency while maintaining significant energy savings. C6Awarm achieves its goals by (1) implementing medium-grained power gating, (2) preserving the microarchitectural state of the core, and (3) keeping the clock generator and PLL active and locked. Our analysis for a set of microservices based on an Intel Skylake server shows that C6Awarm manages to reduce the energy consumption by up to 70% with limited performance degradation (at most 2%).

Modern user-facing applications deployed in datacenters use a distributed system architecture that exacerbates the latency requirements of their constituent microservices (30-250$\mu$s). Existing CPU power-saving techniques degrade the performance of these applications due to the long transition latency (order of 100$\mu$s) to wake up from a deep CPU idle state (C-state). For this reason, server vendors recommend only enabling shallow core C-states (e.g., CC1) for idle CPU cores, thus preventing the system from entering deep package C-states (e.g., PC6) when all CPU cores are idle. This choice, however, impairs server energy proportionality since power-hungry resources (e.g., IOs, uncore, DRAM) remain active even when there is no active core to use them. As we show, it is common for all cores to be idle due to the low average utilization (e.g., 5-20%) of datacenter servers running user-facing applications. We propose to reap this opportunity with AgilePkgC (APC), a new package C-state architecture that improves the energy proportionality of server processors running latency-critical applications. APC implements PC 1A (package C l agile), a new deep package C-state that a system can enter once all cores are in a shallow C-state (i.e., CC1) and has a nanosecond-scale transition latency. PC 1A is based on four key techniques. First, a hardware-based agile power management unit (APMU) rapidly detects when all cores enter a shallow core C-state (CC1) and triggers the system-level power savings control flow. Second, an IO Standby Mode (IOSM) places IO interfaces (e.g., PCIe, DMI, UPI, DRAM) in shallow (nanosecond-scale transition latency) low-power modes. Third, a CLM Retention (CLMR) mode rapidly reduces the CLM (Cache-and-home-agent, Last-level-cache, and Mesh network-on-chip) domain’s voltage to its retention level, drastically reducing its power consumption. Fourth, APC keeps all system PLLs active in PC 1A to allow nanosecond-scale exit latency by avoiding PLL re-locking overhead. Combining these techniques enables significant power savings while requiring less than 200ns transition latency, $\gt250\times$ faster than existing deep package C-states (e.g., PC6), making PC 1A practical for datacenter servers. Our evaluation based on an Intel Skylake-based server shows that APC reduces the energy consumption of Memcached by up to 41% (25% on average) with <0.1% performance degradation. APC provides similar benefits for other representative workloads.

User-facing applications running in modern datacenters exhibit irregular request patterns and are implemented using a multitude of services with tight latency requirements (30–250$\mu$s). These characteristics render existing energy-conserving techniques ineffective when processors are idle due to the long transition time (order of 100$\mu$s) from a deep CPU core idle power state (C-state). While prior works propose management techniques to mitigate this inefficiency, we tackle it at its root with AgileWatts (AW): a new deep CPU core C-state architecture optimized for datacenter server processors targeting latency-sensitive applications.AW drastically reduces the transition latency from deep CPU core idle power states while retaining most of their power savings based on three key ideas. First, AW eliminates the latency (several microseconds) of savinglrestoring the core context when powering-off/-on the core in a deep idle state by i) implementing medium-grained power-gates, carefully distributed across the CPU core, and ii) reraining context in the power-ungated domain. Second, AW eliminates rhe flush latency (several tens of microseconds) of the LllL2 caches when entering a deep idle state by keeping LllL2 content power-ungated. A small control logic also remains ungated to serve cache coherence traffic. AW implements cache sleep-mode and leakage reduction for the power-ungated domain by lowering a core’s voltage to the minimum operational level. Third, using a state-of-the-art power efficient all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL) clock generator, AW keeps the PLL active and locked during the idle state, cutting microseconds of wake-up latency at negligible power cost.Our evaluation with an accurate industrial-grade simulator calibrated against an Intel Skylake server shows that AW reduces the energy consumprion of Memcached by up to 71% (35% on average) with<1% end-to-end performance degradation. We observe similar trends for other evaluated services (MySQL and Kafka). AW’s new deep C-states C6A and C6AE reduce transition-time by up to 900$\times$ as compared to the deepest existing idle state C6, while consuming only 7% and 5% of the active state (C0) power, respectively.