Category: power consumption
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Dennard scaling a necessary condition for Moore’s law
Dennard scaling was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for Moore’s law to play out over many decades. Transistors generate heat, and continually adding more transistors to a device will eventually cause it to melt, because the generated heat cannot be removed fast enough. However, if the fabrication of transistors on the surface of a…
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CPU power consumption and bit-similarity of input
Changing the state of a digital circuit (i.e., changing its value from zero to one, or from one to zero) requires more electrical power than leaving its state unchanged. During program execution, the power consumed by each instruction depends on the value of its operand(s). The plot below, from an earlier post, shows how the…