Super low-power CPUs on the horizon?
 

Despite the advent of lower-power designs from Intel and AMD recently, today's processors are still power-hungry beasties. One company says it has a solution (subscription required) to the problem, which may lead to the kind of clock speed increases we used to see back in the heyday of Intel's "it's all about CPU speed" fixation.

Multigig, a small Silicon Valley firm, is proposing using high-frequency timing loops to synchronize processors. Currently CPUs use regular electrical pulses to keep all of their components in sync. Those pulses are responsible for over half of the power consumption in some processors.