Power gating to conserve processor energy

Science Daily writes.

A research team at Case Western Reserve University came up with a novel idea, called fine-grained power gating, which saves power and money in a couple of ways: less energy would be used and less heat produced.

"Using less power produces less heat. Less heat means less cooling is needed," eScience News quotes Swarup Bhunia, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and an author of the research, as saying.

"That can avoid the need for a big fan to cool off the processor, which saves a lot of money."

According to Overclockers Club, the researchers did some calculations and found implementing a fine-grained grating design could reduce power usage by as much as 40%.

Unfortunately, this is not something that could be enabled in current chips. Perhaps the next generation of processors, desktop and mobile will implement this concept.