Abstract
Some have argued that the dichotomy between high-performance operation and low resource utilization is false – an artifact that will soon succumb to Moore’s Law and careful engineering. If such claims prove to be true, then the traditional 8/16- vs. 32-bit power-performance tradeoffs become irrelevant, at least for some low-power embedded systems. We explore the veracity of this thesis using the 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor and find quite substantial progress but not deliverance. The Cortex-M3, compared to 8/16-bit microcontrollers, reduces latency and energy consumption for computationally intensive tasks as well as achieves near parity on code density. However, it still incurs a ~2× overhead in power draw for “traditional” sense-store-send-sleep applications. These results suggest that while 32-bit processors are not yet ready for applications with very tight power requirements, they are poised for adoption everywhere else. Moore’s Law may yet prevail.
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Ko, J. et al. (2012). Low Power or High Performance? A Tradeoff Whose Time Has Come (and Nearly Gone). In: Picco, G.P., Heinzelman, W. (eds) Wireless Sensor Networks. EWSN 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7158. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28169-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28169-3_7
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