what drives the arm power consumption?

some interesting questions put up by shardul in the ARM orkut forum:

"what is 'it' that actually affects power consumed by a procesor...?the bus
traffic?internal register altrations?memory reads / cache
interaction?von-numann- / harvard- base?what is the factor that
differentiatessome processor designs (like ARM etc.) to be
power-efficientcompared to other processors (like x86) ?"

What indeed.. I'd say CPU Speed is a factor.. but that just means all the gates in the processor run at a lesser speed.. hence the per gate consumption is lower. but really.. what is the architecture factor that gives the edge for ARM?? I am keeping a close watch on this discussion..

marker day

An out of context post, but sad day today, the manager I most respected in TI left..

news today

--TI's CEO sees new chip drivers --The semiconductor market may be mature and feeling the brunt of aslowdown. But there are still many new and untapped markets in the ICarena, namely in medical, video, among others, said Richard Templeton,president and chief executive at Texas Instruments.http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e5Mi0FyTZ10FrK0E67y0Ec

--ARM tips plans for next-generation processor--ARM Holdings plc, the licensor of processors and related intellectualproperty, has tipped sparse details of plans for a next-generationprocessor a follow on to the three processor cores the comprise theCortex series.http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e5MV0FyTZ10FrX0E64b0A1

--1.2 percent dip in chip sales 'reflect seasonal decline'--Sales of semiconductors in January were worth $21.47 billion inJanuary, up 9.2 percent on the corresponding month in 2006, accordingto the Semiconductor Industry Association. However, this represents aseasonal decline of 1.2 percent from the $21.74 billion reported inDecember.http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e5MV0FyTZ10FrX0E64k0AB

crypto news: https://webmail.wipro.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0702a.html

OAV

Object oriented programming speaks of Objects and classes. Classes have operations and attributes.. How can we exploit this for Embedded baseport environment?
Operations: read/write/ioctls etc
Attributes: variants accross boards and silicons: such as base address, Chip selects etc..
Values: the initializing value for the driver creating this..
benefits: portability..
linux already has something of this sorts: resource structure.. only, it can be extended to a larger extent.

OMAP has IP Blocks.. such as i2c controllers, DMA4 controllers etc... we can use the above concept to create "in theory" a highly portable model.