Comparative Analyses of Power Consumption in Arithmetic Algorithms Implementation

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 resources scheduling in order to provide a reduction of total power consumption. This study focuses on the subject of power consumption from the software developer’s point of view, using a reliable power measurement framework to validate the programming literature’s premise that programming options – such as multiplication operations are high consumers of power. Besides some elementary operations and authors’ suggestions about alternatives for power consumption reduction on the programming stage, two well-known and widely applied algorithms for large number multiplication were compared: Karatsuba and Toom-Cook. The results lead to conclusions that might help a developer to choose, in some cases, between execution speed or power consumption reduction, or establish a maximum power consumption limit for the