Though I'm sure this is valuable in certain instances, thinking about many embedded designs today, is the CPU/micro really the energy hog in these systems?
We're building an EEG headband with bone-conduction speaker so in order of power, our speaker/sounder and LEDs are orders of magnitude more expensive than our microcontroller.
In anything with a screen, that screen is going to suck all the juice, then your radios, etc. etc.
I'm sure there are very specific use-cases that a more energy efficient CPU will make a difference, but I struggle to think of anything that has a human interface where the CPU is the bottleneck, though I could be completely wrong.
Human interfaces, sure, but there's a good chunk of industrial sensing IoT that might do some non-trivial edge processing to decide if firing up the radio is even worth it. I can see this being useful there. Potentially also in smart watches with low power LCD/epaper displays, where the processor starts to become more visible in power charts.
Wonder if it could also be a coprocessor, if the fabric has a limited cell count? Do your dsp work on the optimised chip and hand off the the expensive radio softdevice when your codesize is known to be large.
I would not expect that this becomes competitive against a low power controller that is sleeping most of the time, like in a typical wristwatch wearable.
However, the examples indicate that if you have a loop that is executed over and over, the setup cost for configuring the fabric could be worth doing. Like a continuous audio stream in a wakeup-word detection, a hearing aid, or continous signals from an EEG.
Instead of running a general purpose cpu at 1MHz the fabric would be used to unroll the loop, you will use (up to) 100 building blocks for all individual operations. Instead of one instruction after another, you have a pipeline that can execute one operation in each cycle in each building block. The compute thus only needs to run at 1/100 clock, e. g. the 10kHz sampling rate of the incoming data. Each tick of the clock moves data through the pipeline, one step at a time.
I have no insights but can imagine how marketing thinks: "let's build a 10x10 grid of building blocks, if they are all used, the clock can be 1/100... Boom - claim up to 100x more efficient!"
I hope their savings estimate is more elaborate though...
particularly solar/outdoor/remote applications. I run ESP32s from super-cheap USBC solar panels with integrated battery/BMS for various measurements, keeps them running 24/7 regardless of weather due to how little they consume. They pop on every 4 minutes, power the sensors, connect to the WiFi network, beep out their data, then go back to sleep. Seeed's ~$6 ESP32C3/C6 boards have onboard BMS for 3.7V cell even, if I didn't prefer the integrated panel/battery method.
We're building an EEG headband with bone-conduction speaker so in order of power, our speaker/sounder and LEDs are orders of magnitude more expensive than our microcontroller.
In anything with a screen, that screen is going to suck all the juice, then your radios, etc. etc.
I'm sure there are very specific use-cases that a more energy efficient CPU will make a difference, but I struggle to think of anything that has a human interface where the CPU is the bottleneck, though I could be completely wrong.