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\title{Power and Complexity in Microprocessors}
\author{Greg Hudson}
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Lyon argues that because power requirements scale incommensurately
with clock speed of processors, we can reduce power requirements of
microprocessors by using multiple slow processors in place of one fast
processor.  He does not, unfortunatelly, do a very good job of
addressing the issues of processor synchronization in a
multiprocessing system, so this argument requires more development.

In addition to this argument, however, there are other arguments in
favor of parallelism.  First, Lyon points out several power-intensive
design decisions made for the Alpha, such as ungated clock signals,
which enabled it to run at a very high clock rate.  These kinds of
decisions also make the Alpha inefficient at lower clock rates.  The
added complexity resulting from such design decisions reflects the
generality that, as you push a design to its limits, complexity
increases more rapidly than performance.  By using multiple, slower
processors, you do not push the limits of any individual processor,
and thus do not require as much complexity.

An obvious counter to this arises: multiprocessing is in itself more
complicated than single processing, and the interactions between
processors could become a source of more complexity.  It is not clear
which approach is less complex overall.

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