PowerEscape has added a new utility to its development toolsuite. “Insight” aims to reduce power consumption by improving the “data efficiency” of C-language code. The company says improving data efficiency in the initial stages of development yields higher performance for the same amount of power.

PowerEscape previously shipped Synergy and Architect, two power optimization tools meant for use later in the development cycle.

According to PowerEscape, “computation ceases to be the primary performance and power bottleneck in data-intensive applications such as digital video, audio, telecommunications, and networking. Accesses to memory consume both processor bandwidth and system power, by moving data through a complex memory hierarchy.”

“Traditional software optimization has focused on computational efficiency by replacing sections of C code with assembly code,” the company continues. “Optimizations for data efficiency can be made much earlier in the development cycle by simply changing C code to reduce data movement between memories and the processor.”

The company states that an unnamed major semiconductor vendor used PowerEscape tools to improve the data efficiency of an h.264 video decoder, resulting in an increase in performance from 5 to 80 fps.

PowerEscape's Architect, Synergy, and Insight development tools are available now for Linux, Mac OS X Tiger, and Windows XP with Visual Studio .NET 2003 or Eclipse, according to the company.

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