Low power or high performance? a tradeoff whose time has come (and nearly gone)

  • Authors:

  • JeongGil Ko;Kevin Klues;Christian Richter;Wanja Hofer;Branislav Kusy;Michael Bruenig;Thomas Schmid;Qiang Wang;Prabal Dutta;Andreas Terzis

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University;Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley;Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia;Department of Computer Science, Friedrich---Alexander University Erlangen---Nuremberg, Germany;Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia;Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia;Department Computer Science, University of Utah;Department of Control Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, China;Division of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor;Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University

  • Venue:
  • EWSN'12 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Wireless Sensor Networks
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Some have argued that the dichotomy between high-performance operation and low resource utilization is false --- an artifact that will soon succumb to Moore's Law and careful engineering. If such claims prove to be true, then the traditional 8/16- vs. 32-bit power-performance tradeoffs become irrelevant, at least for some low-power embedded systems. We explore the veracity of this thesis using the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor and find quite substantial progress but not deliverance. The Cortex-M3, compared to 8/16-bit microcontrollers, reduces latency and energy consumption for computationally intensive tasks as well as achieves near parity on code density. However, it still incurs a ~2× overhead in power draw for "traditional" sense-store-send-sleep applications. These results suggest that while 32-bit processors are not yet ready for applications with very tight power requirements, they are poised for adoption everywhere else. Moore's Law may yet prevail.