Research Narrative

The first challenge, power dissipation, became evident at the beginning of this decade, and the importance has only grown in magnitude in the last several years. Power dissipation manifests as a problem in three fundamental ways: 1) high power dissipation is the primary performance limiter for mainstream highperformance microprocessors — it is simply not cost-effective to cool and deliver power to microprocessors with high power dissipation; 2) power dissipation limits the capabilities of battery-powered mobile devices and “off-grid” computers such as wireless sensor nodes and computing devices in the developing world; and 3) energy costs dominate the cost of modern internet datacenters; 80% of the costs of Microsoft’s recent 200MW datacenter in Chicago are energy related. The environmental impact of increased energy dissipation in information technology devices must also be considered.