Configurable VLIW core boosts energy efficiency for long battery life

September 13, 2017 // By Nick Flaherty, eeNews Europe

Researchers at Cambridge Consultants in the UK have developed a flexible VLIW core for highly power efficient systems that can be 'always on' for years from a small battery.

“We are finding that the computation in cloud data centres they are now constrained by their cooling requirements and Google and Amazon are offloading their computation to FPGAs to reduce their power consumption so they can pack in more compute power,” said Bryan Donoghue, digital system lead at Cambridge Consultants, which is part of the Altran group.

“We have had a number of projects exploring flexible systems with the power efficiency that approaches that of dedicated hardware,” said Donoghue. “You can build a 16x16 multiplier in 5000 gates, a Teak-lite II DSP takes 100K gates, and ARM’s Cortex R7 core takes 1.3M gates. So I want to add more flexibility but not go all the way to a CPU."

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