The Fight Against Dark Silicon

An anonymous reader writes "What do you do when chips get too hot to take advantage of all of those transistors that Moore's Law provides? You turn them off, and end up with a lot of dark silicon — transistors that lie unused because of power limitations. As detailed in MIT Technology Review, Researchers at UC San Diego are fighting dark silicon with a new kind of processor for mobile phones that employs a hundred or so specialized cores. They achieve 11x improvement in energy efficiency by doing so."

That's not the solution, this is

[thisisauniqueid]

Language support for ubiquitous and provably threadsafe implicit parallelization -- done right -- is the answer to using generic dark silicon -- not building specialized silicon. See The Flow Programming Language, an embryonic project to do just that: http://www.flowlang.net/p/introduction.html [flowlang.net]

Not required..

[willy_me]

The CPU in a cell phone does not use much power so there is little to gain. Now if you can make more efficient radio transceivers - that would be something. Or the display, that would also significantly reduce power consumption. But adopting a new, unproven technology for minimal benefits.... That's not going to happen.

Link to attached Paper about specialized cores...

[file_reaper]

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/swanson/papers/Asplos2010CCores.pdf [ucsd.edu]

They call the specialized cores "c-cores" in the paper. I took a quick skim through it. C-cores seem like a bunch of FPGA's and they take stable apps and synthesize it down to FPGA cells with the use of the OS on the fly. The C-core to hardware chain has Verilog and Synopsis in it.

Cool tech, guess they could add gated clocking and all the other things taught in classroom to further turnoff these c-cores when needed.

cheers.