I just got out of a talk from Trevor Mudge, a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan.

The purpose of his talk was on Power Consumption of computers, for both the desktop computer and mobile computer devices such as PDA's and handhelds.

He has an interesting prospective on things. Though I am not sure I agree with him totally. He started by showing the trends in the Compaq Alpha chip and its huge power usage increase over the years (with minimal die size increase). He also talked about the recent versions of the AMD Athlon chip, but mainly focused on the Pentium 4. Basically he thinks that these microprocessors are going in the wrong direction. He believes that any kind of predictions microprocessors make are a waste of time and energy because they could be doing unneccesary calculations.

He talked further about the XScale technology (for those of you not aware, XScale is the StrongARM SA2 processor, Intel wants to stray away from calling it an ARM processor so they made a nifty new name) and how it has the ability to scale down its clock speed and power usage.

Basically, what it comes down to is he says the only way to reduce power consumption to a good level is parrellel processing. According to his talk, most of the modern microprocessors die (almost 40% in some cases) goes to the cache. He thinks that by doing muliple CPUs on a die that run at lower clock speeds you could get more performance from a system that uses less power (he used a bunch of forumlas to come to the conclusion that cutting clock frequency by 1/2 cuts power consumption by 1/4, thus two 500Mhz. CPUs would use 1/2 the power of one 1Ghz. CPU).

Basically this all seams to say that CMT (I think I am using the correct term here) is the way of the future, what do you guys think?

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Q: How many UGA students does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Two, one to call a friend at GT and another to follow the directions.