Power Management in the Amulet Microprocessors

puting have seen spectacular improvements in the capabilities of machines. The first computer to run a program stored in its own memory, the Manchester University’s 1948 Baby machine, as shown in Figure 1, occupied a medium-sized room, used 3.5 kW of electrical power, and executed 700 instructions per second. The latest machine designed at the University of Manchester, the Amulet3i asynchronous subsystem on the Draco chip, shown in Figure 2, occupies 25 mm2 of silicon, consumes 132 mW, and executes up to 100 million instructions per second. The improvement in the power-efficiency of machines over this 50 year period may be measured by comparing the energy per instruction from Baby to Draco, and the result is a staggering factor of over 3 billion. Few technologies have seen improvements of this order over half a century, and the technology continues to improve.