Technical Field
This disclosure is directed to electronic circuits, and more particularly, a method and apparatus for balancing processing workloads in electronic circuits.
Description of the Related Art
Power consumption in integrated circuits (ICs) is an important design consideration. Minimizing power consumption in an IC can reduce the thermal output from a corresponding electronic device, and can also preserve battery life for mobile devices. Accordingly, many ICs include various types of circuitry dedicated to monitoring activity levels in various functional circuits implemented thereon. When such functional circuits are determined to be idle, they may be placed into a sleep state, thereby reducing the overall power consumption of the IC.
Although it is desirable to reduce power consumption in idle functional circuit blocks, placing them in a sleep state does require some overhead. For example, in a processing circuit, a current state may need to be saved before placing it in the sleep state. This may include copying the states of registers and other internal memories, as well as saving status information regarding other circuits (e.g., schedulers, etc.). This can consume time both when entering the sleep state as well as exiting. In some cases, certain functional circuitry may need to be able to quickly respond to inbound transaction, requests, and so forth. If the performance hit incurred due to entering and exiting a sleep state is deemed to be unacceptable, such functional circuits may not be placed into a sleep state, and may continue to remain in an active state.