Pinned to the walls — Impact of packaging and application properties on the memory and power walls

This article presents a study of the impact of packaging on the memory and power walls, in the context of application properties. The analysis is supported by characterizations of 130 hardware designs spanning 30 years, along with both microarchitectural simulation and actual-hardware performance counter measurements of 25 applications. It is shown that if trends in supply pin count (growing as the square root of current) and total packaging pin count (doubling every six years) continue, application memory bandwidth requirements, even in the presence of aggressive cache hierarchies, may limit the number of on-chip threads to under a thousand in 2020.