Boffins at Rice University have been given shedloads of cash to come up with a super compiler which can speed up computers and reduce the power they need.

Code compilers, which translate languages into machine code, are a bottle neck to computer speed. They also take a long time to build and, by the time they are out, are hopelessly out of date. The Rice University boffins believe they can solve this issue by developing a single new super-compiler that could improve the performance of nearly every application running on a computer chip.

The US Department of Defence likes the plan so much that its Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has agreed to spend $16 million over the next 54 months to allow Rice and its partners, including Texas Instruments, to develop a set of tools to significantly improve compilers.
The boffin's plan of attack is to strike on two fronts. First, they aim to develop computational tools that automatically analyze a processor, such as how many operations it can perform at once.

The next stage is to build an open-source compiler that, based upon the analysis of a processor's capabilities, can automatically tailor itself to help programmers easily develop a reasonably good compiler.

If they can get it going then small processors, such as those in mobile phones, the main benefit probably will be a decrease in power usage. The bigger processors should get increased processing power.