Green smartphone GPUs: Optimizing energy consumption using GPUFreq scaling governors

Abstract

Modern smartphones are limited by their short battery life. The advancement of the graphical performance is considered as one of the main reasons behind the massive battery drainage in smartphones. In this paper we present a novel implementation of the GPUFreq Scaling Governors, a Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) model implemented in the Android Linux kernel for dynamically scaling smartphone Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). The GPUFreq governors offer users multiple variations and alternatives in controlling the power consumption and performance of their GPUs. We implemented and evaluated our model on a smartphone GPU and measured the energy performance using an external power monitor. The results show that the energy consumption of smartphone GPUs can be significantly reduced with a minor effect on the GPU performance.