Summary: May 2004 81
E M B E D D E D C O M P U T I N G
M
oore's law has held sway
over the past several
decades, with the number
of transistors per chip
doubling every 18
months. As a result, a fairly inexpen-
sive CPU can perform hundreds of
millions of operations per second--
performance that would have cost mil-
lions of dollars two decades ago.
We should be proud of our achieve-
ments and rest on our laurels, right?
Unfortunately, no.
The human appetite for computation
has grown even faster than the pro-
cessing power that Moore's law pre-
dicted. We need even more powerful

Source: Austin, Todd M. - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan
Chakrabarti, Chaitali - Department of Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University
Mudge, Trevor - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences; Engineering