Trends and techniques for energy efficient architectures

Microprocessor architectures have become increasingly power limited in recent years. Currently power and thermal envelopes dictate peak performance limits more than any other design constraint. As voltage scaling has slowed down, innovative techniques have been pursued to improve the power efficiency of the increasingly demanding multi-core architectures. In this paper we look at recent trends in multi-cores with a special focus on trends and techniques to address these challenges. © 2010 IEEE.