Analysis, verification and design for energy aware computation

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The gigahertz race is over. For over two decades, microprocessors have been doubling in clock speed and performance every one or two years. In the past two years, this exponential trend has been replaced by a slow climb. Heat is the culprit -- the technological trends that drove CPUs up in speed also drove them up in power consumption. Heat limits the CPU and graphics processor in a desktop computer; power limits the battery life of laptop computers, PDAs, and cell phones; and large computing companies such as Google and e-bay are limited airconditioning for their warehouses full of computers. Parallelism is the most promising solution. The physics of the transistors that make the chips work mean that if a task can be divided between multiple CPUs, the total energy can be much less than if the task were done on a single CPU. This is why every computer manufacturer is coming out with multi-core processors.