Many-core design from a thermal perspective

Air cooling limits have been a major design challenge in recent years for integrated circuits. Multi-core exacerbates thermal challenges because power scales with the number of cores, but also creates new opportunities for temperature-aware design, because multi-core designs offer more design parameters than single-core designs. This paper investigates the relationship between core size and on-chip hot spot temperature and shows that with the same power density, smaller cores are cooler than larger cores due to a spatial low-pass filtering effect of temperature. This phenomenon suggests that designs exploiting low-pass filtering can dissipate more power within the same cooling budget than contemporary designs. Categories and Subject Descriptors B.7.2 Hardware [Design Aids]: General Terms Design Keywords temperature, many-core design, thermal design power, performance

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Wei Huang, Mircea R. Stan, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, Robert J. Ribando, Kevin Skadron
• Keywords: DAC 2008, Design Automation, Spatial Low-pass Filtering, Terms Design Keywords, Thermal Design Power