ARM's East cites power as key IC design driver

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – The prospect of both climate change and "unsustainable" data growth means engineers should focus on reducing power consumption in their device designs, according to Warren East, CEO of ARM

In an ARM TechCon keynote here Thursday (Nov. 1), East sketched a future of vastly different design considerations that span everything from servers and cloud infrastructure to the billions of devices that will comprise the Internet of Things. East also used the keynote to announce that ARM is becoming a promoter member of the Weightless Special Interest Group that was originally created by Neul Ltd., a startup company that also comes from Cambridge, England.

East (right, projected on a stage screen) was joined onstage by George Grey, CEO of the non-profit Linaro software organization and Judson Althoff, senior vice president at Oracle Corp., who helped show off ARM's energy efficiency credentials and partnership model.

While power consumption will increase as the number of users increase and devices proliferate, designers can focus on other areas to cut usage .East said electric motors consume 50 percent of the world's electricity, and any efficiency improvement there would yield big benefits. Similarly, lighting consumes about 20 percent of global electricity production while IT and communications accounts for about 10 percent of global consumption.

"ARM is built on energy-efficient fundamental technology and partnership," said East. As an example of how ARM's technology can help save power, East claimed that simply moving a computing function from desktop to a tablet computer can cut power usage.