Virtualization Times

The IT and consumer electronics industries have a long way to travel in terms of improving power efficiency of electronic systems and devices, a Hewlett-Packard researcher argues in the latest issue of the Association for Computing Machinery's flagship journal.

"We've made tremendous progress over the past several years," said HP Labs distinguished technologist Parthasarathy Ranganathan, in an interview with IDG. "But when you look at the fundamental limits," the industry could make quantum leaps in efficiency, he said.

How much so? Extending the arguments of famed physicist Richard Feynman into the digital age, Ranganathan estimated that, based on "the physical limits on the power costs to information transfer," the power used by a single handheld could, in theory, power a billion desktop computer processors.