Michael Taylor (CSE Colloquium)
''GreenDroid: An Architecture for the Dark Silicon Era''
Michael Taylor
UCSD
Monday, November 21, 2011, 11:00 am
EBU3B, Room 1202
Abstract
The Dark Silicon Era kicked off with the transition to multicore and will be characterized by a wild chase for seemingly ever-more insane architectural designs. At the heart of this transformation is the utilization wall, which states that, with each new process generation, the percentage of transistors that a chip can switch at full frequency is dropping exponentially due to power constraints. This has led to increasingly larger and larger fractions of a chip's silicon area that must remain passive, or dark.
Our research attacks this dark silicon problem directly through a set of energy-saving accelerators, called Conservation Cores, or c-cores. C-cores are a post-multicore approach that constructively uses dark silicon to reduce the energy consumption of an application by 10x or more. To examine the utility of c-cores, we are developing GreenDroid, a multicore chip that targets the Android mobile stack. Our mobile application processor prototype targets a 32-nm process and is comprised of hundreds of automatically generated, specialized, patchable c-cores. These cores target specific Android hotspots, including the kernel. Our preliminary results suggest that we can attain an average 7x improvement in energy efficiency using a modest 7 mm^2 of silicon.
Short biography
