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There's No Such Thing As a General-Purpose Processor

CowboyRobot writes: David Chisnall of the University of Cambridge argues that despite the current trend of categorizing processors and accelerators as "general purpose," there really is no such thing and believing in such a device is harmful.

"The problem of dark silicon (the portion of a chip that must be left unpowered) means that it is going to be increasingly viable to have lots of different cores on the same die, as long as most of them are not constantly powered. Efficient designs in such a world will require admitting that there is no one-size-fits-all processor design and that there is a large spectrum, with different trade-offs at different points."

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  1. 1 Calorie per day = 48.4 mW by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    100 watts corresponds to 2000 Calories per day

    Also, watt represents momentary consumption and calories are a fixed mass of energy

    Calories and calories per day are not the same unit. A calorie is 4.18 kJ, and a calorie per day is 4.18 kJ / 86.4 ks = 48.4 mW. Multiply this by 2000 and you'll end up very close to 100 W.