BAD HARDWARE WEEK

Not content with the American domination of the CPU industry, seven of Japan's dominant processor designers and manufacturers have teamed up to create a revolutionary new microprocessor.

Will support "innovative energy-saving software." Current prototype runs on 30% the power of a standard CPU?

"Effective power reduction of an application program on multicore processors requires appropriate power control for each on-chip resource by compilers or users. These low power techniques need an application program interface (API) to realize power control in a user program. This paper proposes a power saving scheme for multicore processors using OSCAR API developed in NEDO “Multicore for Realtime Consumer Electronics” project. The proposed scheme has been implemented in OSCAR compiler to realize the power reduction for fastest execution mode, which minimizes power consumption without performance degradation, and the realtime execution mode to minimize power consumption under realtime constrains. The proposed scheme is evaluated on an 8 cores SH4A multicore processor RP2, newly developed for consumer electronics by Renesas Technology Corp., Hitachi, Ltd. and Waseda University in the above project. For the fastest execution mode, consumed energy was reduced by 13.05% for SPEC2000 art and 3.99% for SPEC2000 equake. Also, for the realtime execution mode, consumed power was reduced by 87.9% for AAC encoder and 73.2% for MPEG2 decoder."

BAD HARDWARE: That is quite expecting after skyrocketing expenses for production of the next generation chip geometries.