Microprocessor design issues: thoughts on the road ahead

With the scaling of technology promising increases in chip frequency and especially transistor density, system designers must make trade-offs for a rapidly moving target. They must constantly deal with area, time, power, reliability, and technology design trade-offs as well as enormous design complexity at the same time. The driving force in design innovation is the rapid advance in technology. As technology advances and feature size shrinks, the three other design considerations benefit from one process generation to another, resulting in higher speed, smaller area, and reduced power consumption. Here, we look at the technology roadmap and what it means to computer architects, updating our views of six years ago.