Comparative Analysis of Power Consumption in the Implementation of Arithmetic Algorithms

Historically, energy management in computer science has been predominantly treated as an activity of hardware optimization. A great deal of the effort in this area is concentrated on component activation, deactivation, and resource scheduling in order to provide a reduction of total power consumption. This work focuses on the study of power consumption from the developer's point of view, using a reliable power measurement framework to validate the literature's premise that programming options, such as multiplication operations, are high consumers of power energy. Besides some elementary operations and authors' suggestions about alternatives for power consumption reduction on the programming stage, we also compare and evaluate two well-known and widely applied algorithms for large number multiplication: Karatsuba and Toom-Cook. The obtained results provide guidelines to the developer in the programming phase to choose, in some cases, the best technique to reduce power consumption, speed up the software, and establish a maximum power limit for the completed software.