Survey: 77% of Engineers Feel Pressure to Reduce Power Consumption in their Designs

The survey was kept very short, but covered several interesting topics that included multi-threading, multi-core, and sensitivity to power consumption.

Responses confirmed that power consumption is a primary concern among design engineers, with 28% of respondents choosing this as their top concern, compared to 18% choosing the top concern of processor performance, and 18% choosing the top concern of raw processing power.

Over three quarters of respondents reported feeling pressure to reduce power consumption without sacrificing performance; not surprisingly, nearly all surveyed indicated they would appreciate a new IP core that offered low power consumption without losing performance - who wouldn’t?

As the survey suggests, the demands of today’s applications are forcing design engineers to look for the holy grail of how to increase performance, while simultaneously reducing power.

MIPS Technologies’ new Aptiv cores were designed to achieve top performance in their class - each achieves the highest published CoreMark/MHz score in their respective class - but delivers that performance very efficiently. The goal is to provide designers with a range of compelling options to satisfy this increasing challenge in their next designs.

One final nugget of info gleaned from the survey results - with 1/3 of the total votes, Star Wars rates as the best sci-fi movie, with 2001: A Space Odyssey coming in a distant second place. Other noteworthy mentions included Avatar and Blade Runner.