ARM said that the performance per watt will be the new Moore’s law

ARM published a new article on its ARM Blueprint blog, arguing that the computing model is changing, and the performance per watt will be the new Moore’s law and become the driving goal of the design. Rob Aitken, researcher and technical director of ARM, wrote an article reviewing the entire industry and its development direction.

In the past, everyone has seen an increase in transistor density. In Moore’s Law, device performance continues to improve. This is very true. Until a few years ago, designers began to encounter difficulties. The semiconductor process is becoming smaller and smaller, and it is almost impossible to build such a small new node when it is close to the atomic size. Following this is some new analysis to predict how far we can go along this path. ARM is currently at a breakthrough point. New designs or new IPs under development are incorporating an important factor into this process, namely computing efficiency and performance per watt.

Performance per watt is a new specification because more modern designs are considering computing efficiency as the main factor for each step of improvement. As designs become larger and more complex, efficiency may decrease. In order to obtain a better design, engineers must target a certain performance point and achieve it with as little power as possible.

Optimize workloads to take advantage of ultra-low-power processing. This can be motivated by means such as TinyML, which focuses on the optimization of machine learning workloads that can run at milliwatt-level power. After the performance per watt becomes the new specification, the product roadmap can be guided to extract more and more performance from the power range.