Low Power or High Performance? A Tradeoff Whose Time Has Come (and Nearly Gone)

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.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: EWSN
• Authors: JeongGil Ko, Kevin Klues, Christian Richter, Wanja Hofer, Branislav Kusy, Michael Brünig, Thomas Schmid, Qiang Wang, Prabal Dutta, Andreas Terzis
• Keywords: Code Density, Computer Networks, EWSN 2012, Performance Operation, Performance Tradeoffs