TY - GEN
T1 - Low power or high performance? A tradeoff whose time has come (and nearly gone)
AU - Ko, Jeonggil
AU - Klues, Kevin
AU - Richter, Christian
AU - Hofer, Wanja
AU - Kusy, Branislav
AU - Bruenig, Michael
AU - Schmid, Thomas
AU - Wang, Qiang
AU - Dutta, Prabal
AU - Terzis, Andreas
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Some have argued that the dichotomy between high-performance operation and low resource utilization is false - an artifact that will soon succumb to Moore's Law and careful engineering. If such claims prove to be true, then the traditional 8/16- vs. 32-bit power-performance tradeoffs become irrelevant, at least for some low-power embedded systems. We explore the veracity of this thesis using the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor and find quite substantial progress but not deliverance. The Cortex-M3, compared to 8/16-bit microcontrollers, reduces latency and energy consumption for computationally intensive tasks as well as achieves near parity on code density. However, it still incurs a ∼2x overhead in power draw for "traditional" sense-store-send-sleep applications. These results suggest that while 32-bit processors are not yet ready for applications with very tight power requirements, they are poised for adoption everywhere else. Moore's Law may yet prevail.
AB - Some have argued that the dichotomy between high-performance operation and low resource utilization is false - an artifact that will soon succumb to Moore's Law and careful engineering. If such claims prove to be true, then the traditional 8/16- vs. 32-bit power-performance tradeoffs become irrelevant, at least for some low-power embedded systems. We explore the veracity of this thesis using the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor and find quite substantial progress but not deliverance. The Cortex-M3, compared to 8/16-bit microcontrollers, reduces latency and energy consumption for computationally intensive tasks as well as achieves near parity on code density. However, it still incurs a ∼2x overhead in power draw for "traditional" sense-store-send-sleep applications. These results suggest that while 32-bit processors are not yet ready for applications with very tight power requirements, they are poised for adoption everywhere else. Moore's Law may yet prevail.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-28169-3_7
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-28169-3_7
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84863145030
SN - 9783642281686
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 98
EP - 114
BT - Wireless Sensor Networks - 9th European Conference, EWSN 2012, Proceedings
T2 - 9th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks, EWSN 2012
Y2 - 15 February 2011 through 17 February 2011
ER -
