Dark Silicon — A thermal perspective

Abstract

Summary form only given. Dark Silicon is predicted to dominate the chip footage of upcoming many-core systems within a decade since Dennard Scaling fails mainly due to the voltage-scaling problem that results in higher power densities. It would deem upcoming technologies nodes inefficient since a majority of cores would lie fallow. International research efforts have recently started to investigate and mitigate Dark Silicon effects to ensure an effective use of available chip footage. The talk starts with an overview of state-of-the-art in Dark Silicon research and how it is driven by thermal constraints. Besides background on thermal issues and its impact on reliability, effective solutions are presented that scale especially with respect to many-core systems.