Power is being traded off against performance everywhere. It’s time for a change.
As you’ll notice today, we’ve changed our name from Low Power Engineering to Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering. We don’t take name changes lightly—we’ve been discussing this in depth with readers, sponsors, and researchers for the past six months. The almost universal conclusion is there is a big shift underway in the semiconductor industry today, and our new logo is a better reflection of what’s happening around the globe.
You can blame Moore’s Law for the shift. Or you can blame physics. It’s both of those and much more. The historical tradeoffs between area, power and performance have settled into a delicate balancing act between performance and power. Area is still important for business reasons, but it’s far less important from a technology standpoint.
The key here is nothing will change in our coverage of power and efficiency, but we will add more resources to focus on performance, as well. That includes everything from changes in SoCs, embedded software and IP at the data center and base station level all the way down to the most power-sensitive mobile electronics—subjects we have covered in the past strictly from a power perspective.
The concern for power isn’t diminishing. It’s a key aspect of every design today. In some cases, that may require more processing more quickly, and in others it may mean centralizing or distributing processing and fine-tuning the hardware, the software and the IP. That means boosting performance in some cases, and at certain times, and lowering it at others. Or it means specialized processors that can perform operations more effectively than a general-purpose processor and operating system.
As always, we are open to looking into issues that affect our readers. We encourage you to write to us with your questions and concerns—and with complete anonymity. And we hope you like the expanded coverage.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Leave a Reply