Analysis, verification and design for energy aware computation

千兆赫的竞争结束了。二十多年来，微处理器的时钟速度和性能每隔一两年就会翻一番。在过去的两年里，这种指数增长趋势已经被缓慢攀升所取代。热量是罪魁祸首——推动cpu提高速度的技术趋势也推动了它们的功耗上升。热量限制了台式电脑的中央处理器和图形处理器；电源限制了笔记本电脑、pda和手机的电池寿命；而像谷歌和e-bay这样的大型计算机公司，其装满计算机的仓库的空调也很有限。并行是最有希望的解决方案。使芯片工作的晶体管的物理特性意味着，如果一个任务可以在多个CPU之间进行分配，那么总能量就会比在单个CPU上完成要少得多。这就是为什么每个计算机制造商都推出多核处理器的原因。

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 In the past two years, this exponential trend has been replaced by a slow climb.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.