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Aug

2011

Some Scientists Fear Computer Chips Will Soon Hit a Wall - NYTimes.com

A paper presented in June at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture summed up the problem: even today, the most advanced microprocessor chips have so many transistors that it is impractical to supply power to all of them at the same time. So some of the transistors are left unpowered — or dark, in industry parlance — while the others are working. The phenomenon is known as dark silicon.

As early as next year, these advanced chips will need 21 percent of their transistors to go dark at any one time, according to the researchers who wrote the paper. And in just three more chip generations — a little more than a half-decade — the constraints will become even more severe. While there will be vastly more transistors on each chip, as many as half of them will have to be turned off to avoid overheating.

www.nytimes.com/...01chips.html

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Moore's Law Innovation Electricity Technology

The problem has the potential to counteract an important principle in computing that has held true for decades: Moore’s Law. It was Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, who first predicted that the number of transistors that could be nestled comfortably and inexpensively on an integrated circuit chip would double roughly every two years, bringing exponential improvements in consumer electronics.
In their paper, Dr. Burger and fellow researchers simulated the electricity used by more than 150 popular microprocessors and estimated that by 2024 computing speed would increase only 7.9 times, on average. By contrast, if there were no limits on the capabilities of the transistors, the maximum potential speedup would be nearly 47 times, the researchers said.
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- Some scientists disagree, if only because new ideas and designs have repeatedly come along to preserve the computer industry’s rapid pace of improvement. Dr. Dally of Nvidia, for instance, is sanguine about the future of chip design.
  “The good news is that the old designs are really inefficient, leaving lots of room for innovation,” he said.
- Shekhar Y. Borkar, a fellow at Intel Labs, called Dr. Burger’s analysis “right on the dot,” but added: “His conclusions are a little different than what my conclusions would have been. The future is not as golden as it used to be, but it’s not bleak either.”
  Dr. Borkar cited a variety of new design ideas that he said would help ease the limits identified in the paper. Intel recently developed a way to vary the power consumed by different parts of a processor, making it possible to have both slower, lower-power transistors as well as faster-switching ones that consume more power.
  Increasingly, today’s processor chips contain two or more cores, or central processing units, that make it possible to use multiple programs simultaneously. In the future, Intel computers will have different kinds of cores optimized for different kinds of problems, only some of which require high power.
- And while Intel announced in May that it had found a way to use 3-D design to crowd more transistors onto a single chip, that technology does not solve the energy problem described in the paper about dark silicon. The authors of the paper said they had tried to account for some of the promised innovation, and they argued that the question was how far innovators could go in overcoming the power limits.
- “It’s one of those ‘If we don’t innovate, we’re all going to die’ papers,” Dr. Patterson said in an e-mail. “I’m pretty sure it means we need to innovate, since we don’t want to die!”