Cost of moving data and the power budget

[Robert Myers]

This chart

http://www.coherentlogix.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48&Itemid=67

made me wonder, as usual, how one would feed such a beast, but it also
made me wonder if the power consumed by processing (performance/
processor-watt) matters all that much any more, and in what contexts.

In general, I would expect the power budget for high-throughput
processing to be dominated by the cost of moving data and not the cost
of crunching it.

I assume that the answer would be signal processing applications,
about which I know very little in practice. Can someone offer
perspective?

This message has been posted to comp.arch as well as to the google
group high-bandwidth computing.

Robert