Full Article is worth a read http://semiengineering.com/power-centric-chip-architectures/

New approaches can lower power, but many are harder to design.

As traditional scaling runs out of steam, new chip architectures are emerging with power as the starting point.

Power is emerging as the major constraint in designs these days, both in terms of the impact on battery life and utility bills, as well as the associated physical effects such as heat and electromigration, and the impact of those physical effects on reliability over time. In many ways power is a cost that is rising, which is why it has become the starting point around which an increasing number of chips are being architected.

There are many ways to tackle power. None of them is simple, and no single approach solves everything. Power is a system-level problem, which means it has to be considered at every level, from what kinds of components are used, how they are utilized and connected together, how they are laid out on a chip, what materials work best and using what manufacturing process, and even how they are ultimately tested.

But it also is a huge opportunity for the semiconductor and design industry. New tools and approaches are under development that can make designing for power much more predictive with significantly better accuracy and faster turnaround. Change is coming, but in this case it is likely to come across many markets and technologies at once. Power is, after all, a global problem, and it will an entire industry to solve it.