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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."

4 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

    1. Re:That's not the solution, this is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Uuum, no need to learn some obscure weird language that doesn't even exist yet, when you can learn a (less) obscure weird language that already exists. ;)

      Haskell already has provable thread-safe implicit parallelization. In more than one form even. You can just tell the compiler to make the resulting binary "-threaded". You can use thread sparks. And that's only the main implementations.

      Plus it is a language of almost orgasmic elegance on the forefront of research that still is as fast as old hag grandma C and its ugly cellar mutant C++.

      Requires the programmer to think on a higher level though. No pointer monkeys and memory management wheel reinventors. (Although you can still do both if you really want to.)

      Yes, good sir, you can *officially* call me a fanboy.
      But at least I'm a fan of something that actually exists! ;))

      (Oh, and its IRC channel is the nicest one I've ever been to. :)

  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.

  3. Re:If they can get my phone to last a week or more by RobbieThe1st · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They can, they just don't want to. All they have to do is make it slightly thicker amd double the size of the battery.
    Heck, I want to see a phone where the battery is the back cover(like the old Nokia dumbphones), and also has a small second battery inside it, something that can power the ram/cpu for 5 minutes.
    Then, you can just yank the dead battery, plug a new one in /without rebooting/.
    It would also allow for multiple battery sizes: Want a slim phone? Ok, use a small battery. Need two weeks of life? use a large battery.

    Easy solution.