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Many-core design from a thermal perspective
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Synctium: a Near-Threshold Stream Processor for Energy-Constrained Parallel Applications
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Dark silicon and the end of multicore scaling
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Efficient complex operators for irregular codes
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Dynamically Specialized Datapaths for energy efficient computing
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Toward Dark Silicon in Servers
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QsCores: trading dark silicon for scalable energy efficiency with quasi-specific cores
Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
HPCA '12 Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE 18th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Process variation in near-threshold wide SIMD architectures
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Design Automation Conference
Computational sprinting on a hardware/software testbed
Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
A shared-FPU architecture for ultra-low power MPSoCs
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REGIMap: register-aware application mapping on coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs)
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Design Automation Conference
Asymmetric scaling on network packet processors in the dark silicon era
ANCS '13 Proceedings of the ninth ACM/IEEE symposium on Architectures for networking and communications systems
ASAFESSS: A Scheduler-driven Adaptive Framework for Extreme Scale Software Stacks
Proceedings of International Workshop on Adaptive Self-tuning Computing Systems
Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis
Bitcoin and the age of bespoke silicon
Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Compilers, Architectures and Synthesis for Embedded Systems
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Due to the breakdown of Dennardian scaling, the percentage of a silicon chip that can switch at full frequency is dropping exponentially with each process generation. This utilization wall forces designers to ensure that, at any point in time, large fractions of their chips are effectively dark or dim silicon, i.e., either idle or significantly underclocked. As exponentially larger fractions of a chip's transistors become dark, silicon area becomes an exponentially cheaper resource relative to power and energy consumption. This shift is driving a new class of architectural techniques that "spend" area to "buy" energy efficiency. All of these techniques seek to introduce new forms of heterogeneity into the computational stack. We envision that ultimately we will see widespread use of specialized architectures that leverage these techniques in order to attain orders-of-magnitude improvements in energy efficiency. However, many of these approaches also suffer from massive increases in complexity. As a result, we will need to look towards developing pervasively specialized architectures that insulate the hardware designer and the programmer from the underlying complexity of such systems. In this paper, I discuss four key approaches--the four horsemen--that have emerged as top contenders for thriving in the dark silicon age. Each class carries with its virtues deep-seated restrictions that requires a careful understanding of the underlying tradeoffs and benefits.