Power Briefs
Benchmarks
For years the federal government’s ENERGYSTAR program has been benchmarking white goods, and more recently it has applied the same power consumption to enterprise servers. But until now, there has been no similar type of standardized benchmarking at the component level.
That’s changing, however. The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium has integrated its EnergyBenchTM software into all of its benchmark suites (with the exception of GrinderBenchTM) at no cost to its licensees. The suite has been implemented using National Instruments’ LabVIEW software and X Series data acquisition hardware. While the performance benchmarks are running on the targed board, EnergyBench calculates the average energy per iteration using multiple unaliased sampling frequencies and an adaptive statistical process.
More SOI
ARM introduced its first 45nm SOI test chip that it claims can boost power savings by 40%. What makes this particularly interesting is the battle between ARM and Intel. ARM is trying to boost its performance enough to compete with Intel, while also trying to stay in very tight power envelopes, while Intel is trying to drop its power enough to compete with ARM in many portable devices such as smart phones.
The battleground du jour is netbooks, and what’s interesting about SOI technology is it also allows chipmakers to cut power or increase clock frequencies. In fact, ARM claims it can also cut power by 30% and increase the clock frequency by 20%. What happens if it leans completely in the direction of performance?
So far, Intel has said it will not use partially depleted SOI (silicon on insulator) technology, although it is looking at fully depleted SOI. ARM, as part of its alliance with the Common Platform companies, is looking at SOI as a competitive advantage.
