New trends in dark silicon

Abstract

This paper presents new trends in dark silicon reflecting, among others, the deployment of FinFETs in recent technology nodes and the impact of voltage/frquency scaling, which lead to new less-conservative predictions. The focus is on dark silicon from a thermal perspective: we show that it is not simply the chip's total power budget, e.g., the Thermal Design Power (TDP), that leads to the dark silicon problem, but instead it is the power density and related thermal effects. We therefore propose to use Thermal Safe Power (TSP) as a more efficient power budget. It is also shown that sophisticated spatio-temporal mapping decisions result in improved thermal profiles with reduced peak temperatures. Moreover, we discuss the implications of Near-Threshold Computing (NTC) and employment of Boosting techniques in dark silicon systems.