GreenDroid: An architecture for the Dark Silicon Age

— The Dark Silicon Age kicked off with the transition to multicore and will be characterized by a wild chase for seemingly ever-more insane architectural designs. At the heart of this transformation is the Utilization Wall, which states that, with each new process generation, the percentage of transistors that a chip can switch at full frequency is dropping exponentially due to power constraints. This has led to increasingly larger and larger fractions of a chip’s silicon area that must remain passive, or dark. Since Dark Silicon is an exponentially-worsening phenomenon, getting worse at the same rate that Moore’s Law is ostensibly making process technology better, we need to seek out fundamentally new approaches to designing processors for the Dark Silicon Age. Simply tweaking existing designs is not enough. Our research attacks the Dark Silicon problem directly through a set of energy-saving accelerators, called Conservation Cores, or c-cores. C-cores are a post-multicore appr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ASPDAC
• Authors: Nathan Goulding-Hotta, Jack Sampson, Qiaoshi Zheng, Vikram Bhatt, Joe Auricchio, Steven Swanson, Michael Bedford Taylor
• Keywords: ASPDAC 2012, Hardware, Power Constraints, Silicon Age, Silicon Area