Posted on Sunday, October 25 2009 @ 10:05 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
ARM CTO Mike Muller
talked about the power problems chip designers will be facing within a year or ten:
In a decade, 11nm process technology could deliver devices with 16 times more transistors running 2.4 times as fast as today's parts, said Mike Muller in a keynote address. But those devices will only use a third as much energy as today's parts, leaving engineers with a power budget so pinched they may be able to activate only nine percent of those transistors, Muller said.
Researchers are working on a variety of techniques so power limits do not strangle future designs, Muller said. They include use of more dynamic power management techniques at the system and task level, energy recycling on chip and stacked die with wireless interconnects.
