IDF: Synchronization to drop energy consumption by 50%?

Andrew Chien, Vice President of Intel's Corporate Technology Group, presented a new technology at the IDF in Shanghai that can cut power consumption of a computer system by 30 to 35 percent.

The technology works by synchronizing system events at the hardware level, this makes the system a lot more power efficient than allowing asynchronous calls for power. Chien's presentation showed synchronizing the system results in more idle time as the system only needs to wake up once in a while:

By synchronization system events at the hardware level--as opposed to allowing asynchronous calls for power--baseline system power consumption can be reduced dramatically. The demonstration showed that, under normal conditions, the system can't really ever “go to sleep” resulting in a steady level of power consumption. If, however, system events are synchronized the system only needs to wake up once in a while.

Intel's goal is to achieve a 50% power consumption reduction for 2010.