HotSpot 6.0: Validation, Acceleration and Extension

Abstract

The challenge of removing the heat generated by microprocessors with reasonable cost has long been identified as a critical issue. As a matter of fact, the cooling constraint (a.k.a., thermal wall) has became a major hurdle that limits the scaling of operating frequency and transistor density. As a fast and accurate thermal model, HotSpot enables early-stage evaluation of chip temperature and therefore supports architectural study of dynamic thermal management strategies, chip floorplanning, and novel cooling solutions.