Imagine a Nintendo Game Boy with the gee-whiz graphics of a Sony
PlayStation 2 console. That’s one of the visions that inspired a
team at the University of California, Berkeley, to design a new
microprocessor that puts the capabilities of chips found in game
consoles and personal computers into battery-powered handheld
devices.Berkeley computer scientists David Patterson, Kathy
Yelick, and their students combined several unusual features for
their Vector Intelligent Random Access Memory chip. The
researchers placed transistors dedicated to short-term memory
along with the processor on a single chip: that’s a departure
from the typical microprocessor arrangement that has most memory
on separate chips. This change alone reduces the chip’s power
consumption to less than one-twelfth that of the processors
inside most PCs and laptops. The Berkeley researchers also wrote
a program that breaks the repetitive instructions involved in
video processing into chunks that can be processed in parallel.
Finally, the researc