5 Questions: Todd Austin: Future Processors will have to get Lean

Abstract

In July, a University of Michigan computer engineering professor put out a new idea for measuring the efficiency of a processor design. Todd Austin's LEAN metric received both praise and skepticism, but even the critics understood the rationale: A lot of silicon is devoted to things that are not actually doing computing. For example, more than 95 percent of an Nvidia Blackwell GPU is designated for other tasks, Austin told IEEE Spectrum. It's not like these parts aren't doing important things, such as choosing the next instruction to execute, but Austin believes processor architectures can and should move toward designs that maximize computing and minimize everything else.