Thread: Power and Power Efficient

Mobile computing In notebooks,AMD introduced a new mobile platform called Puma which features the dual core Turion ultra or mobile Sempron processor, wireless IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n mini-PCIe Wi-Fi adapter and graphics from ATL The new platform also features support for possible low voltage processors and other features like trusted platform module (TPM) along with support for HyperTransport 3.0 and PCI express 2.0. On the other hilnd, Centrino which has been Intel's flagship platform for sometime, was upgraded to the fifth generation Centrin02 platform, that consumes lesser power than the previously available platforms.

It boasts an Intel Core 2 Duo 45nm processor with clock speeds from 2.26GHz to 3.06GHz, the mobile chipset offers RAM support for DDR3 SODIMM and NAND flash-memory caching, branded as Intel turbo memory, along with Gigabit Ethernet LAN controllers. Also low cost mobile computing came to life with the birth of new products such as netbooks and nettops, due to the introduction of small low power processors like the Nano from VIA and Atom from Intel.



Desktop computing

Though it is the dual core processors from AMD and Intel which remain popular in the consumer desktop market, a new microarchitecture from Intel called Nehalem has been introduced. This architecture comes with significant changes to its design, to substantially improve the performance of processors based on it. Core i7 is the name given to the desktop range of processors based on the new architecture and has a number of revolutionary changes such as integrated 'memory controller supporting DDR3 RAM, the Intel QuickPath Interconnect technology which replaces the conventional front side bus and simultaneous multitbreading or hyperth reading.

Servers

This segment saw the evolution of a revolutionary 6-core processor based on Intel's Core Microarchitecture called the Dunnington, under the Xeon brand of server class processors. It effectively increases the processing power on each socket by six times, thus making the process of building a more powerful machine a little more economical, as the cost of motherboards increase dramatically with increase in the number of sockets. This means that in a four socket motherboard, installing four Dunnington processors would give you a staggering 24 cores. Dunnington featured a single-die six core design and is based on Intel's 45nm Penryn process. It is the first Xeon processor to feature up to 16MB ofL3 cache on board which helps in improving performance by reducing latency in accessing frequently used data.

The Road Ahead

Really, haven't we seen it all yet? Nope, we haven't. One might think that with the current clock speeds and the number of cores that processors boast, we might be witnessing the end of all that could be offered. If it helps in anyway, the answer is that it doesn't seem like we will stop until most of the processes are executed fast, as fast as the blink of an eye, ie until the processors are as scalable and multitask-friendly as the human brain itseW Oops, they are already more than that. Maybe until even when on full load they shall consume as less a power as a child's night lamp. Now, let's take a quick peek at what lies ahead.