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Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Static pipelines enable lower power mobile CPUs

Lowering the power requirements, in order to lengthen the battery lifetime of mobile devices, is the goal of a National Science Foundation project to develop static pipelining. Look for ultra-low-power processors to enable applications like lifetime pacemakers that do not need battery changes within five years. R.C.J.


Extending the battery lifetime of mobile processors using static pipelining is the goal of a $1.2 million, four-year grant from the National Science Foundation to computer scientists at Florida State University (FSU).
Pipelining increases a processor's speed by performing multiple operations in sequential stages simultaneously—like the stages an automobile goes through on an assembly line. And just as multiple cars are on an assembly line, so do multiple instructions ripple through the pipelined stages of the processors used for mobile devices. Unfortunately, though today's pipelines improve performance, they also introduce unnecessary redundancies such as repeatedly loading registers. According to FSU, static pipelining technique can cure these issues...The long-term goal of the FSU project is to optimize the performance of mobile processors to the point of enabling ant-sized devices capable of extremely long battery lifetimes, such as next-generation pacemakers that do not require periodic surgeries to change their batteries.
Full Text: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-dmlv