"GreenArrays is shipping its 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ/inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle).
Tight coding to minimize instructions executed will minimize power. The programmer can also reduce instruction fetches, transistor switching and duty cycle.
They just are not widely used because ARM and similar processors offer much more computational power and people are happy charging their devices every day or so.
> They just are not widely used because ARM and similar processors offer much more computational power and people are happy charging their devices every day or so.
This is exactly my point. Ultra low power processors exist, but they're not used for consumer electronics. Developers would rather build something bloated, quickly, than take the time to optimize. And technological advancements has taken away a lot of the pressure for optimization (e.g. I'm sure it was a super high priority to get a Psion to sip power, because a recharge was going to the store and paying $4 for a set of new batteries).
If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.
> If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.
Agreed! I wish there were widespread ways of throttling CPU and memory given to desktop applications today. If I'm testing a web application, I tell Firefox to throttle my network down to GPRS and see the responsiveness (or lack thereof) and once my work is done and GPRS is reasonably fast (or whatever) I can give a quick glance at normal 4G speeds and see my web app screams now.
So why can't I lock a desktop application to settings like "an unused 386 PC with 24MB of RAM"?
> If I were a dictator that ruled with an iron fist, I'd mandate that all software be developed[^W*] on underpowered devices, then released on fast ones.
*"tested"/"run during development exclusively"
You still want the text editor and more importantly compiler to run on beefy workstation hardware, in order to avoid programmer productivity problems like long compilation times[0] and to take advantage of CPU-intensive optimization techniques.
"GreenArrays is shipping its 144-core asynchronous chip that needs little energy (7 pJ/inst). Idle cores use no power (100 nW). Active ones (4 mW) run fast (666 Mips), then wait for communication (idle).
Tight coding to minimize instructions executed will minimize power. The programmer can also reduce instruction fetches, transistor switching and duty cycle.
Chuck Moore
GreenArrays, Inc."
Source: https://youtu.be/0PclgBd6_Zs
They just are not widely used because ARM and similar processors offer much more computational power and people are happy charging their devices every day or so.