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ARM Holdings built a name for itself via power savings. Saving power is a huge benefit.
ARM’s secret recipe for power efficient processing
There are several different companies that design microprocessors. There is Intel, AMD, Imagination (MIPS), and Oracle (Sun SPARC) to name a few. However, none of these companies is known exclusively for their power efficiency. One company that does specialize in energy efficient processors is ARM. That isn’t to say they don’t have designs aimed at power efficiency, but this isn’t their specialty. One company that does specialize in energy efficient processors is ARM.While Intel might be making chips needed to break the next speed barrier, ARM has never designed a chip that doesn’t fit into a predefined energy budget. As a result, all of ARM’s designs are energy efficient and ideal for running in smartphones, tablets and other embedded devices. But what is ARM’s secret? What is the magic ingredient that helps ARM to produce continually high performance processor designs with low power consumption?
In a nutshell, the ARM architecture. Based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), the ARM architecture doesn’t need to carry a lot of the baggage that CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) processors include to perform their complex instructions. Although companies like Intel have invested heavily in the design of their processors so that today they include advanced superscalar instruction pipelines, all that logic means more transistors on the chip, more transistors means more energy usage. The performance of an Intel i7 chip is very impressive, but here is the thing, a high-end i7 processor has a maximum TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 130 watts. The highest performance ARM-based mobile chip consumes less than four watts, oftentimes much less.
And this is why ARM is so special, it doesn’t try to create 130W processors, not even 60W or 20W. The company is only interested in designing low-power processors. Over the years, ARM has increased the performance of its processors by improving the micro-architecture design, but the target power budget has remained basically the same. In very general terms, you can breakdown the TDP of an ARM SoC (System on a Chip, which includes the CPU, the GPU and the MMU, etc.) as follows. Two watts max budget for the multi-core CPU cluster, two watts for the GPU and maybe 0.5 watts for the MMU and the rest of the SoC. If the CPU is a multi-core design, then each core will likely use between 600 to 750 milliwatts.
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ARM’s secret recipe for power efficient processing
There are several different companies that design microprocessors. There is Intel, AMD, Imagination (MIPS), and Oracle (Sun SPARC) to name a few. However, none of these companies is known exclusively for their power efficiency. One company that does specialize in energy efficient processors is ARM.
