In the December issue of Computer

Despite advances in power efficiency fueled largely by the mobile computing industry, computer-energy consumption continues to challenge both industry and the global economy. In the US, enterprise energy consumption doubled over the past five years and will continue to do so.

And this does not include the energy cost of manufacturing components—it is estimated that Japan’s semiconductor industry will consume 1.7 percent of that country’s energy budget by 2015. The articles in this issue propose strategies for mitigating these costs by designing systems that consume energy in proportion to the amount of work performed, establishing new benchmarks and accurate ways of modeling power consumption, and even recycling older processors over several computing generations.