low-power high-performance computing

With semiconductor technology scaling reaching physical limits, overcoming power limitations is one of the major issues on the path to increased performance. It is well-accepted that specialization and heterogeneity at the hardware level can be keys to achieving orders of magnitude improvements in both power consumption and performance. However, full-custom hardware design is expensive in many ways. The question is whether multi-core processors can be designed that achieve the efficiency of custom hardware with enough flexibility to run a broad class of applications.