If you were looking for lessons on energy-efficient computing, one person you would want to speak with would be Steve Furber, principal designer of the highly successful ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) processor.
In ACM Queue’s interview this month he shares some of the lessons on energy-efficient computing he has learned through working on these and subsequent projects.

Steve Furber says, “If you want an ultimate low-power system, then you have to worry about energy usage at every level in the system design, and you have to get it right from top to bottom, because any level at which you get it wrong is going to lose you perhaps an order of magnitude in terms of power efficiency. The hardware technology has a first-order impact on the power efficiency of the system, but you’ve also got to have software at the top that avoids waste wherever it can. You need to avoid, for instance, anything that resembles a polling loop because that’s just burning power to do nothing.”

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