Hypervisors For Managing Power


By Ed Sperling Hypervisors are headed for a new role inside of multicore chips—managing the various power islands in addition to the cores. A patent application filed by IBM, entitled “Method and system for hypervisor based power management,” shows the company’s intention to use hypervisors for everything from monitoring power consumption rates to scaling power for individual cores.... » read more

Power Trip Advisor


By Geoffrey James There’s never been a greater demand for power-efficient silicon. As consumer electronic devices get smaller, with increased functionality, battery power becomes a premium resource. At the same time, “Green IT” is a major corporate trend, and the best way to be environmentally sensitive (while saving on energy costs) is to buy technology that ekes the maximum computing o... » read more

The FPGA Alternative


By Geoffrey James Until a few years ago, SoC designers focused almost exclusively on ASICs. While it was theoretically possible to create an SoC design for an FPGA, the programmable chips were too bulky and pricey to be useful for much more than prototyping. Today, however, designers are increasingly turning to FPGAs for their SOC targets for production systems. Why the sudden upsurge in So... » read more