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Boosting Battery Life For RISC Processors
prostoalex writes "National Semiconductor and ARM Holdings will jointly develop the power management solution for RISC chips, that they estimate will improve battery life by 25-400%. The target date of the first sample product is Q2 2003." My old Tadpole laptop sure could have used this. I counted myself as lucky when I got a whole 45 minutes out of a battery.
[BLOCKQUOTE]
According to the article:
Arm's Intelligent Energy Manager solution implements advanced algorithms to optimally balance processor workload and energy consumption, while maximizing system responsiveness to meet end-user performance expectations.
Transmeta's only claim to fame for their chips was using software to reduce power consumption, and it worked -- obviously, the Intelligent Energy Manager is just a ripoff of Transmeta's design. Linus should sue. [/BLOCKQUOTE]
Umm, no? These aren't CPUs used in computers and laptops.. these are used in handheld devices and embedded applications. I develop for ARM personally and the "algorithms" (note: they do not say software) is simply silicon embedded within the processor.. not software that runs on the processor itself.
As the poster mentioned, I doubt this will affect any laptops. I don't know of any that run off ARM cores.
http://www.arm.com/news/powerwise1111
They're basically targetting mobile phones and similar embedded systems like PDAs, because this is where ARM's main market share is at the moment. They say that they're looking at a more system-wide approach than is currently used, and they want to standardize the embedded software/hardware interface as part of this.
Also, note that "samples available Q2 2003" doesn't necessarily mean actual silicon. ARM doesn't make chips, they license their designs out to other companies which use them as a basis for an actual chip, so a "sample" quite likely means a software simulation. Actual devices which use this technology probably won't be around until 2004 at least.
That is one method of doing it (turning of clock trees to shut down a set of gates). One other way is to adjust the supply voltage and clock frequency to the CPU core. As ARM allready utilizes clock gating, the voltage/frequency technique is a very viable option for even more efficient CPUs. I'm usually not a big fan of Intel's, but look at their XScale and the measures they've taken to preserve energy. I have to say that I'm impressed!