Engineering teams are facing a flood of data that will be generated by the Internet of Things, both from the chip design side and from the infrastructure required to handle that data.

There are several factors that make this problem particularly difficult to deal with. First, there is no single data type, which means data has to be translated somehow into a usable format. Second, the amount of power required to handle all of this data will be huge if it is not intelligently managed. And third, the infrastructure required to handle this data is being built or upgraded at a much slower rate than the technology producing it.

“The amount of data is very large and you’ve got to do it in a power envelope that doesn’t suck the planet dry,” said Sundari Mitra, CEO and co-founder of NetSpeed Systems. “It is very heterogeneous. So, if you have a very general purpose computer, your power is going to explode. You cannot have power-hungry things chugging away when they are not in use just because they are general purpose.”