Chip Morphing

Engineering is a study of tradeoffs. In computer engineering the tradeoff has traditionally been between performance, measured in instructions per second, and price. Because of fabrication technology, price is closely related to chip size and transistor count. With the emergence of embedded systems, a new tradeoff has become the focus of design. This new tradeoff is between performance and power or energy consumption. The computational requirements of early embedded systems were generally more modest, and so the performance-power tradeoff tended to be weighted towards power. "High performance" and "energy efficient" were generally opposing concepts.
However, new classes of embedded applications are emerging which not only have significant energy constraints, but also require considerable computational resources. Devices such as space rovers, cell phones, automotive control systems, and portable consumer electronics all require or can benefit from high-performance processors. The future generations of such devices should continue this trend.
Processors for these devices must be able to deliver high performance with low energy dissipation. Additionally, these devices evidence large fluctuations in their performance requirements. Often a device will have very low performance demands for the bulk of its operation, but will experience periodic or asynchronous "spikes" when high-performance is needed to meet a deadline or handle some interrupt event. These devices not only require a fundamental improvement in the performance power tradeoff, but also necessitate a processor which can dynamically adjust its performance and power characteristics to provide the tradeoff which best fits the system requirements at that time.