  The management of the energy consumption and thermal dissipation of
multi-core heterogeneous platforms is becoming increasingly important as it can
have direct impact on the platform performance. This paper discusses an
approach that enables fast exploration and validation of heterogeneous system
on chips (SoCs) platform configurations with respect to their thermal
dissipation. Such platforms can be configured to find the optimal trade-off
between performance and power consumption. This directly reflects in the head
dissipation of the platform, which when increases over a given threshold will
actually decrease the performance of the platform. Therefore, it is important
to be able to quickly probe and explore different configurations and identify
the most suitable one. However, this task is hindered by the large space of
possible configurations of such platforms and by the time required to benchmark
each configurations. As such, we propose an approach in which we construct a
model of the thermal dissipation of a given platform using a system
identification methods and then we use this model to explore and validate
different configurations. The approach allows us to decrease the exploration
time with several orders of magnitude. We exemplify the approach on an
Odroid-XU4 board featuring an Exynos 5422 SoC.
