Designing for Low Power

In the last few years, power and power delivery have become the major concerns to computing platforms. The emphasis on power led to several fundamental changes in the design approach of high performance microprocessors. The most notable and visible change was the move to more energy efficient architectures such as the multi-cores. Less visible but equally important changes were also achieved at the design and packaging levels. In this paper, we present some of these fundamental changes. We show how they were applied and validated on a lead 65nm microprocessor leading to significant power savings