It seems to me that Hayakawa's statement could be applied to the industry's effort to reduce power consumption in semiconductors and systems, a search that climbs far up and down the technology ladder, ranging from less-leaky transistors to applications optimized for parallelism. These efforts were discussed at a recent conference here.

IBM's John Kelly III, who's in charge of that company's storage and semiconductor operations, recalled how a networking systems customer once forced him down that ladder. During an on-site visit, the customer ushered Kelly into a room in which hundreds of rack-mounted boards gave off enough heat to rival the Sahara. The customer parked Kelly in front of the heat blowing off the boards, which was all Kelly needed to organize a campaign, kicked off by the two-day conference here, to create energy-efficient designs.

Robert Graybill, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency manager, described at the conference his agency's efforts to develop "power-aware" computing and communications systems. He listed power-aware algorithms, chips with multiple clock domains and flexible systems "that no longer depend on a fixed or static-type API" among the design goals. Graybill then deftly climbed down the ladder of abstractions, noting that some battlefield systems run on D batteries and "the delivery of batteries to the battlefield" is a major issue for commanders.

Japan, meanwhile, takes a top-down approach. The government is gradually enforcing provisions of the 1999 Japan Energy Law, which tracks the power consumption of computers. The law requires companies to meet power targets for the systems they hope to sell in Japan, with weighted-average power budgets for notebooks, "nonbattery clients" and so on.

At the IBM-sponsored seminar, Stanford professor Mark Horowitz offered some plain-soup advice. After discoursing about threshold voltages and Joules per million instructions, Horowitz said designers should "go find a solution that needs less stuff done or can use parallelism." He climbed down the abstraction ladder by concluding: "If you are developing an applications interface, please don't run more than you need to."

That's good advice, for saving money, losing weight or cutting down on the heat blowing off your circuit board.

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