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The Fight Against Dark Silicon

Posted by timothy on from the can't-we-all-just-get-along? dept.

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."

2 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. That's not the solution, this is by thisisauniqueid · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Not required.. by willy_me · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.