“If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin,” Luiz Andre Barroso said in a September paper published in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Queue.

“The possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiraling out of control could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet.”

Barroso’s suggested solution: heavily multithreaded processors that can execute many threads. His term, “chip multiprocessor technology,” or CMP, is close to the “chip multithreading” term Sun employs in their new “Niagara” processor.