A PMC-driven methodology for energy estimation in RVC-CAL video codec specifications

In this paper, an energy estimation methodology based on performance monitor counters (PMC) is proposed to estimate the energy consumption of RVC-CAL video codec specifications. The proposed PMC-driven methodology is able to automatically identify the most appropriate events and training data to cover the main application characteristics. In addition, knowledge of the hardware platform employed is not required. Therefore, this methodology can be easily implemented on other PMC-available systems while keeping the estimation accuracy. It is worth noting that this is an attractive asset to analyze the energy consumption of RVC-CAL codec specifications. Besides, the methodology reduces the PMC redundancy and, thus, the overhead introduced when applied to on-line power management. Experimenting on two RVC-CAL decoders, H.264 and MPEG4 Part2 SP, a coarse estimation model based on instructions per cycle (IPC) and the proposed PMC-driven model are compared. The results show that the PMC-driven model can achieve for the H.264 and MPEG4 Part2 SP decoders average estimation errors of 5.95% and 5.01%, respectively, in comparison to the 17.11% and 13.65% average errors obtained with the IPC-based model. As a consequence, this methodology is suggested to be combined into the RVC framework to help the designer to have an overview of the energy consumption of the specification actors at earlier design stages.