Preface

In future systems, continuing performance improvements, power efficiency, and smaller form factors for both portable product applications and fixed location products will be important. Take, for example, the billions of portable cell phones sold each year wherein the higher function products in this family seek increasing function with each generation while maintaining a fixed size. Another example is high-performance computing systems in which higher performance levels and high power efficiency are leading to high-bandwidth and low-latency multicore processors linked to ever higher stores of close proximity memory.