Abstract: After 40 years of remarkable progress in general-purpose processors, a variety of factors are combining to lead to a much slower rate of performance growth in the future. These limitations arise from three different areas: IC technology, architectural inefficiencies, and changing applications and usage. The end of Dennard scaling and the slowdown in Moore's Law will require much more efficient architectural approaches than we have relied on. Although progress on general-purpose processors may hit an asymptote, domain specific architectures may be the one attractive path for important classes of problems, at least until we invent a flexible and competitive replacement for silicon. Bio:
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