Power and Thermal Analysis of Commercial Mobile Platforms: Experiments and Case Studies

State-of-the-art mobile processors can deliver fast response time and high throughput to maximize the user experience. However, high performance comes at the expense of larger power density, which leads to higher skin temperatures. Since this can degrade the user experience, there is a strong need for power consumption and thermal analysis in mobile processors. In this paper, we first perform experiments on the Nexus 6P phone to study the power, performance and thermal behavior of modern smartphones. Using the insight from these experiments, we propose a control algorithm that throttles select applications without affecting other apps. We demonstrate our governor on the Exynos 5422 processor employed in the Odroid-XU3 board.