Opportunities for embedded software power reductions

While performance and power consumption of processors present a classic trade-off in designing embedded hardware, software can be optimized in favor of both performance and energy. We evaluate the impact of optimizations at different stages of designing embedded software. We show that algorithm choice and compiler optimizations aimed at improving performance can also reduce energy consumption of an embedded processor. We also propose energy-aware compilation guidelines which can further reduce energy consumption without performance penalties. Our experimental results show that up to 85% energy reduction and 89% performance improvement can be achieved by these techniques.