Transistors are being made smaller and leakage current is going up. Dark Silicon: we can no longer turn on all of the chip: perhaps one tenth maximum for today's 22 nanometer chips. Even less in the future.
Slow, bulky power transistors will turn thousands of power islands on and off under automated or manual control.
Conservation cores: use of high-level synthesis (HLS) of standard software kernels into application-specific hardware coprocessors and putting them on the chip in case they are needed? Afterall, they have negligable cost if not turned on.
| 24: (C) 2008-13, DJ Greaves, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory. |