Power Bits: The Battle For Mobile Mindshare
By Ed Sperling
The race is on to provide enough performance gains to justify an upgrade while relentlessly pushing to extend battery life. The goal is nothing short of turning every mobile device into the processing equivalent of a notebook computer, regardless of the form factor.
This trend has been evident for some time, but momentum is building. ARM this week introduced its “big.LITTLE” processor, with its Cortex-A7 processor that it claims is five times more energy efficient than the Cortex-A8 with “significantly” better performance in just 20% of the area. http://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/arm-unveils-its-most-energy-efficient-application-processor-ever-with-biglittle-processing.php
Intel’s 22nm Ivy Bridge chip, meanwhile, has entered production. Intel has said its TriGate FinFET technology would be available at that node, as well, dramatically reducing the power. It’s questionable whether the rest of the industry will follow Intel on the FinFET path at 22nm/20nm, or whether it will substitute other technologies such as SOI and bridge the gap to 14nm. But either way, the direction is clear. More processing power, but a big push toward energy efficiency with maybe some area gains thrown in for good measure.
This is only a piece of the puzzle, of course. Software is becoming much more power aware. Mentor Graphics announced this week that it has added dynamic frequency and voltage scaling capabilities into the kernel of its Nucleus RTOS. While many consumers are used to this kind of capability in general-purpose OSes such as Windows and Mac OSX, RTOSes are also widely used in microcontrollers and in parts of a device that has not been particularly power-aware, if at all. This is the embedded space, after all, and for many companies this has been black-box technology. http://www.mentor.com/company/news/mentor-nuclues-rtos
In the future all pieces will be power-aware, including the IP, firmware and software applications. That should give an even further boost to energy efficiency, along with the need for co-development of hardware and software at an unprecedented scale. Power is a universal concern. There is only one battery, and everyone has to share it—and worry about it.
Tags: ARM, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Power, RTOS